New Roman Times :: "Smoke In Your Disguise"

I am cleaning out my life today because I am moving apartments. Without being overly sentimental, when cleaning out a bedroom you run into artifacts that jog your memory. In this case, it was a schedule. Written in my best hand-writing on a piece of Virgin Records stationary, this was my road-map to CMJ 2007. Sitting in the 9pm slot at the Mercury Lounge on one night in October was Airborne Toxic Event. Funny thing is, I went to see the other show on my schedule: Cut Off Your Hands, Foreign Born, and Oh No! Oh My! But I had Airborne Toxic on the schedule. And that means something.

So across my inbox comes New Roman Times and their suggestion that they might remind me of Airborne Toxic Event. First it's definitely weird that ATE has gone from CMJ after-thought in 2007 to playing for 50 people at Piano's last June to being in publicists' emails as an instantly recognizable, popular artist. For the record, Airborne Toxic Event will be playing Webster Hall next time they come through New York. I'd love to say I didn't call this.

But back to New Roman Times, they do remind me of Airborne Toxic Event or perhaps of a more bombastic Moonbabies. The churning arena-guitars and the crushing lyrics, forget the dance-ready, urgent drums - it all adds up to something big and moving. In the second verse, the guitars pump and the lead-singer crushes "I'll be there right from the start/I'll be there when you fall apart/I'll be the smoke in your disguise." It's about getting away, I think; a dynamic rescue from some unknown threat. It's worth noting the chorus is, "you're breaking my heart/you're breaking my heart/but before we begin/we better learn how to start." This is built for radio and not in an uncredible way either. Airborne Toxic Event isn't a bad comparison. So when you have a chance to see New Roman Times, don't miss it.

Listen :: New Roman Times - "Smoke In Your Disguise"

On The List: Airborne Toxic Event @ Pianos [6.12.08]

Within about three seconds you can tell if a band is ready to blow your doors off or if they're just going to hang around and play some tunes. Airborne Toxic Event opened with "Papillon," maybe one of their less good songs, and it was still obvious they were ready to explode Pianos. Did they sound a little like The Hives? Sure. If The Hives were playing 1950s rock songs and had a working knowledge of the British post-punk scene of the 1980s. It's a profoundly post-modern pastiche of influence and it is fucking awesome.

Airborne Toxic Event play an eight-song set list which the drummer privately confides before the show, "we haven't used a set list in three years but we've got this really nice tour manager ..." before trailing off. The tour manager does look really nice and brings the band water. These are the marks of a band just trying out being bigger and bigger; you've got a publicist and you've got a tour manager and you're 3,000 miles from home with a room full of relative strangers. This can be difficult.

Most of the songs deal with disillusionment and heartbreak. The seminal and explosive "This Is Nowhere" is about the troubled and mercurial Silverlake scene in East Los Angeles. The lead-singer jokes, "you have one of those here too, right? One of those music scenes with a bunch of people completely mortgaging their futures - yeah, I heard that." He tells us that the band is "their life" and you have to believe him.

The band closes with "Innocence," after a fairly pumped up version of "Wishing Well." The song ends with a propulsive, thrashing conclusion. Even though it's not even 9pm and even though Pianos runs very much on time, the crowd stops the band from packing up with sustained applause. The sound tech is moved enough to let the band play one more song. This is relevant because New York crowds rarely work for anything and sound guys rarely give a shit. Perhaps, we just need a band with enough energy and earnesty to cut through the cynicism. Or maybe they were just that good. The band will open for The Fratellis the following evening and things will move on and become bigger and bigger. If there's one rock band to see on tour this summer, it's The Airborne Toxic Event. It means a lot to them and last night, it meant a lot to us.

[Photo credit: EGrossman 2008]

On the List :: The Airborne Toxic Event @ Walt Disney Concert Hall [12.04.09]

"Welcome to this big room," Mikel Jollett offers, marking the beginning and the end of the evening's understatement.

The Airborne Toxic Event lead singer is speaking to the seated crowd at the luminous, $240 million, Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. His band just finished "Wishing Well," a song Jollett sung from somewhere offstage in, one assumes, a well-intentioned effort to let the music, augmented by the Calder Quartet, shine.

The ploy worked, but now, it's Jollett's show. He runs on stage, briefly takes in the scene, makes his one brief introductory comment, and leads his band into another perfectly overwrought song.

For ATE -- accompanied at various points by a troupe of Mexican dancers, the Guerrero children's choir, and the Belmont High School marching band -- the show marks the end of two years on the road. Back within a gallon of gas of their Los Feliz neighborhood, they are here to celebrate in ornate fashion.

To the band's credit, they don't seem overwhelmed by playing in a setting better suited for Vivaldi "Four seasons" than verse-chorus-verse. Crowd favorites "Something New" and "Gasoline" take on a new significance when fused with the chamber's perfect acoustics. After dedicating a cover of a Magnetic Fields song to his recently deceased grandmother ("Play me a song, but not one of those Airborne ones with all the yelling," she requested as she lay dying.), Jollett does a reasonable impersonation of Stephen Merritt's unique bass voice. During "Sometime Around Midnight," the strings of Anna Bulbrook and the quartet bounce hauntingly around the hall. Indie rock can hold its own.

The night ends, as most of these concerts do, with "Missy." Jollett comes onstage without his bandmates, and perches himself on riser with an acoustic guitar and the children's choir as his only accompaniment. Eventually, the song will build to a celebratory climax with members of the Calder Quartet on piano, the dancers on twirling, and the marching band on, well, marching, but for now, it's just the lead singer and eight students. He sings "Just as long as I'm never alone," and the sweet young voices chime in as backup. Jollett leans back, looks at the kids behind him, smiles, and launches into the third verse.

The Airborne Toxic Event fills this big room quite nicely.

Interview :: Mikel Jollett of Airborne Toxic Event [5.3.11]

Mikel Jollett, writer and singer behind Airborne Toxic Event, charged into the crowd no less than three times last night at Piano's, possessed with all of the energy of the same guy, though then considerably less traveled and famous, who took the stage in the same place three years ago. As part of the band's "origins" shows, they've returned to all the small clubs they played when they were first touring as a band, you know, before KROQ added "Sometime Around Midnight" and before everyone had the same thought all at once: Is it possible he wrote this song for and about me? Earlier yesterday, Jollett reflected to us about life in his band, making his new and outstanding record, All At Once and what it means to make music. Our questions and his answers after the jump.

On The List :: Airborne Toxic Event @ Webster Hall [10.16.09]

Airborne Toxic Event's frontman, Mikel Jollet is shaking a bottle of Jameson into the crowd like he just won an American professional sports title. Irish whiskey, not at all known for its carbonation, is somewhat dutifully spraying into the audience. The crowd goes wild. Rock concerts have gone stale and this sort of thing rarely or organically happens. Jollet whirls back around to his left and flushes the final slugs from the bottle. He pauses, looks a little dazed and moves on. But this is the thing about excess; your friends are on stage, the venue is packed and people know the words to your songs. You're facing down fame and it's a little overwhelming but you keep going.

Newly signed to Island/Def Jam in the spring, Airborne Toxic Event are officially not sitting at the kid's table anymore. When we first saw the band two Junes ago at Pianos, they were good-naturedly complaining about having to use a printed-out set-list. It was their tour manager they said, not them, who insisted on making their eight songs official. As the band takes the stage at Webster Hall, two screens project loops of found footage. The lights go down and the band comes out one-by-one with Jollet arriving last. Entrance music surges in the background. This isn't a band taking the stage, it is a festival of return; a parade for the band that used to think parades were funny.

Like any band with one record, the front-half of the set is loaded with the deeper cuts. We get the New York-referencing "Does This Mean You're Moving On," the up-tempo "Gasoline" and staple-cover "Goodbye Horses." Portions of the crowd are distracted and you can see Jollet's frustration as a packed Webster Hall chats in between songs and even during a particularly delicate moment between violinist Anna Bulbrook and himself on stage. He glares to his left at a particularly in-attentive section of the audience. This is the problem with popularity: More people know your band but they might not be the people who you originally enjoyed playing concerts for. 16-months ago there wasn't a breath of talk between songs but that was 80 people and this is 2,500. Music industry rule #43: Once your song impacts at radio, you can't exactly control what happens next.

The night is not all the fight between a band and two-halves of their growing fan base. They play an intimate version of "Wishing Well" with upright-piano, cello, and sparse drums. What will become second-album stand-outs, "Right Now" and another song yet-untitled, draw the audience into a movement they don't fully understand yet. They will really like these songs in a years time when the second-album comes out. Of course, "Sometime Around Midnight" is predictably excellent and "Innocence" is the best live song they play. People are moved and that counts for something.

The encore is an explosive and disjointed affair. Featuring, "All The People Who Died," a Jim Carroll Band cover that Jollet dedicates to the now-dead Jim Carroll. Henry Clay People and Red Cortez take the stage and everyone is a mess of tackling, dancing, and alcohol. These people are young and this fun is real. Someone passes Jollet a bottle of Jameson and he sprays it at the audience. How else do you translate what you're doing on stage to a crowd this size? You do your best to share what you're going through, even if you're not the least bit sure the masses will get the right message. After all, if you've become a part of them - they've become a part of you.

On The List :: Airborne Toxic Event @ The Mercury Lounge [7.31.08]

"You just have to see her. You just have to see her. You know that she'll break you in two." Airborne Toxic Event (ATE) lead singer is intoning these lyrics as the band tears through radio-ready single, "Sometime Around Midnight." The image of a beautiful breakdown isn't anything new. In fact, lyrically, it dates back to Frou Frou's "Let Go" and the tectonic Garden State Soundtrack. It's the idea that there's clarity in pain. The idea that even our most bleak personal struggles have value. It's a theme ATE isn't afraid to take on. They wrote a whole record about it.

The band is enjoying their first New York sellout; crowd that is, not a seeming loss of credibility.  Lead singer, Mikel Jollet pushes the bassist while their cute hipster multi-instrumentalist, Anna Bulbrook bounces around the stage like a sprite who had Leslie Feist as a high school guidance counselor. By the end of the night, she'll end up in the crowd with a tamborine twirling around and turning the end of "Missy" into a complete blow out. The crowd is on board even through a relatively tame first half of the set list.

Jollet makes joking comparison between Silverlake in LA and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Their parallels are obvious and Jollet wants us to know that any competition between the two is uncalled for. "I heard Silverlake and Brooklyn were in a fight ... but that ends right here." The band then tears through, "This Is Nowhere," their best live track and a song that completely sums up the experience of bands "mortgaging their futures." Jollet made the same comment at Pianos a month ago. I could hear him say it again and it's not repetitive if it's still true.

The band closes with "Innocence." It opens in near silence as Jollet approaches the microphone and is barely audible. Someone in the crowd is on a cell phone and you can tell. The crowd lets out a "shhhhhh" and you can be sure that's the first time a Mercury Lounge crowd has shushed someone. But that's the level of engagement here. We're waiting for the band to level us with their finishing kick and no one is going to ruin it with a "dude, alright, cool, we'll talk later." "Innocence" predictably and satisfyingly explodes and the crowd claps along. When Airborne Toxic Event tries to leave the stage, there is simply no way that is happening.

They come back with "Missy" and everyone goes nuts. It's not their best song but it is their last. And if there's beauty in struggling to make it as a band, and beauty in getting your heart broken, then there's beauty in departure. By tomorrow the band will be closing Conan O'Brien and from there they'll continue out on tour and by the time they're back in New York, it'll be the Roseland Ballroom. You're watching something blow up in real time. This band is going to be big. And you can't help but root for them. 

"Come meet us. We promise we won't be assholes. The point here is for us to meet you," says Jollet. It's a populist notion and they mean it. They shake hands with strangers the whole way out. More than a month ago, I said this was the best American rock band on tour right now. I still mean it. 

On The List :: Airborne Toxic Event @ Slim's [San Francisco 4.8.09]

Lead-singer Mikel Jollet runs up the stairs, looks me in the face and says, "Want to play something?" I smile, don't have an answer, and honestly couldn't play more than five chords on anything sitting in my field of vision. It was a rhetorical question, one hopes. Airborne Toxic Event head out on stage at Slim's for their encore to play "Does This Mean You're Moving On." The crowd is going San Francisco's version of crazy. The band is gracious. This is their job and they'd be stupid to turn any part of it over to me.

The crowd is affable and knows this by heart. There is even a kid in the front row, decked in a skinny tie and hard-rimmed glasses, who knows all the words to all the songs. It is a mild feat and, if you scan the audience, he is not alone. The band's self-titled record doesn't speak to people because they have a song at radio. It speaks to people because it means something; something enough to be memorized. And those people are here. The crowd isn't the most mercurial but they are polite and they are engaged. They don't need their lives changed tonight. You sense the record has already done its damage.


The set-list is roughly the same one we caught in New York a few weeks back. They open with "Wishing Well," fill the middle with some new material ("Echo Park," which sounded phenomenal) and they close the main set with "Innocence." During the encore, during "Does It Mean You're Moving On..." Jollet and Anna Bulbrook spill into the audience and flail around in the first few rows. It's one of the moments that makes this band so likeable. There isn't an ounce of pretense, even in their dark jackets and dressing room Grey Goose. Jolett tells us it means a lot that we all came out. Airborne Toxic Event are, in the simplest of ways, not about themselves at all. This is nothing less than impressive.

During the last three measures of "Missy," the night's official closer, the crowd gets their moment of transcendence. Bassist Noah Harmon climbs up two amps, freezes near the top of the room and then lets loose down to the stage. It's the final image of the night and it is a good one. It's just before midnight and this band is killing itself to live. They're from the West Coast and the show is sold out. You'd think they wouldn't have a ton to play for. But that's the great reveal. Believe them when they say this means a lot and see what it's like to go to work at 10:10 on a Wednesday night. This is their job - jumping off speakers, pouring into the crowd, and unleashing narrative and melodies that affect. This is work. And it means everything.

On The List :: Airborne Toxic Event @ The Met, Providence, RI [8.5.11]

(photo via)

All this is not as easy as it looks perhaps. Despite a successful second record, All At Once, charting at 17 on Billboard, with a single, "Changing", in heavy rotation at modern rock radio, Airborne Toxic Event look a little worn. Or maybe, "mechanical" is the right word. For a band that so relied on its mercuriality in 2008, a bizarre combination of surprise success and incredibly magnanimous band members, they seem, for lack of a better word, rehearsed. Singer, Mikel Jollett will later reflect on this grind of being a touring musician, about being far from home and playing too many shows (a worthy footnote: this is one of the most prodigious acts in American rock at something like 200 shows a year) a comment made not to engender any specific sympathy but, rather, to explain why this night ended up turning out so well. He looked exactly at the back of the room and uttered one of those life affirming platitudes that sounds as bullshit as it is completely true, "Nights like this remind you why you do it." This time he's right for all of us.

This is not one of those narratives where we find a band saved by its fans or, as the first paragraph may have mistakenly implied, a band worn down to its dull edge finding some last great moments in front of an admittedly enthusiastic crowd. Airborne Toxic Event will get on their bus and play another show, their music will be licensed in television and movies, they will play late night talk shows, and they will still manage to be the same nice people they were on their first tours at their first shows. In short, they will be fine. But it is a story about degrees. In this case, those small degrees between a live concert being great and being mediocre. Over the long haul, two albums, nearly four years of touring, Europe and back, distinctions like these are achingly slim as the band took the stage, playing "All I Ever Wanted" and loose version of maybe the single biggest rock song of 2011, "Numb".

The set found its legs in the middle, with bassist Noah Harmon upping his intensity level on "Tokyo Radio", a bonus track from All At Once that sounds better live than it does as a fuzzy addendum to the deluxe version of the record. The main set closed with "Something New", the stomping latest single, "Changing" and the band's seminal thesis song, "Sometime Around Midnight". The audience matched this succession of upbeat cuts, on board and singing nearly every lyric, including a guttural screaming of, "I am a gentleman" during the pre-chorus of "Changing". Jollett moved to the edge of the crowd, all of us yelling now, a portent of the singer himself spilling into the audience during the encore.

After a quick trip back stage, the band returned, mostly wearing the t-shirts of opening band The Drowning Men. TATE played classic closing song, "Missy" only stuffing an medley of classic songs in the middle, featuring "I'm On Fire", "I Fought The Law", a song Jollett dedicated to, "that fucking racist cop", and a faithful cover of Johnny Cash's, "Folsom Prison Blues". The closing song would be the eponymous first track off their second album, "All At Once", one of those songs about getting older, becoming something else, and living under the specter of evaporating time. But, Jollett reflects first, telling us it is nights like this that make it worth it. This is not about saving a band, for they don't need to be saved, but it is about remembering why this is so cool, when it has been so cool for so long and started to feel like something else, something granted, given, an "of course", repeated stimulus dangerously recast as a numbing agent.

But despite the band's lyrics at the beginning of the night, the ones about wanting to be numb, all of us will leave in a different capacity. In a wasted, somewhat forgotten section just north of a medium-sized New England city, a crowd packed an old factory for a rock concert and a band found new energy in their fans. I suspect they do this most nights, or maybe only on the good ones, transcending a practiced series of moves, the sublimation of songs they've played maybe a thousand times, and finding something new and important in something old and tiring. Or maybe Jollett says this in every city and every crowd finds it a unique commentary on their supposed uniqueness. But having seen this band enough now, it seemed that something a little special happened with the crowd at The Met. It was only a few degrees above everything else, just a shade, but these are the few degrees that matter.

On The List :: Airborne Toxic Event @ The Bowery Ballroom [3.11.09]

There are singular moments in rock music and then there are Singular Moments In Rock Music. Last night, we're filing under capital "T" Truth. Airborne Toxic Event are on the stage at the Bowery, a string quartet to their right, and their drummer vaulted halfway up to the ceiling. It's an impressive spectacle. If you just squint your eyes a little, you'd see the death-hum of four stringed bows moving and churning in perfect sequence. If you listen hard, you hear a band in rare form - lean and sharp from eight consecutive months of touring. If you listen to what you're feeling, it's ebullient. They're playing "Sometime Around Midnight" and it seems like this band is exploding from every angle like a volcanic Pacific island. This is A Singular Moment In Rock Music.

But the trick is on us. "Sometime Around Midnight," is the song most of the crowd came to see (radio is a bear like that) but it's not the most moving moment of the night. Up next, and last for the set, is "Innocence." The string quartet, vicious and moving on "Midnight" have moved up a level into "potentially lethal" and "emotionally propulsive." The comparison to Arcade Fire doesn't make sense on a genre-level, but as far as strings and the last time they moved anyone like this, well, it's approximate. "Innocence" sounds so big it could rip the pavement off Delancey Street. I've used this expression before and I had no idea how little I meant it then compared to now.

If you rewind a little, the band gave us some songs from the next record. They played a set front-loaded with old material, "Wishing Well" and "Gasoline," packed the middle of the set with new songs, and closed with the old favorites. It's not rocket science but it is rock and roll. The new material made people predictably uncomfortable. For the suit, tie, collar, talk-through-songs set, this was a challenge. For everyone else, it was a window into the future. New songs like "Echo Park" and two of the three others make you think that the second record could be better than the first. And once clear of the new material, the band ripped through "This Is Nowhere," flying into the final act.

I could wax philosophical about "Sometime Around Midnight" and "Innocence" but, put simply, this was the best moment of the night. The crowd was genuinely moved because it was genuinely moving. The band came back for a two-song encore, closed with "Missy" as usual and threw tambourines into the crowd. Then they stepped to the edge of the stage and slapped hands. It was the picture of gravitas. Wait. It was a Singular Moment.

Airborne Toxic Event :: "Neda"

Airborne Toxic Event are back with their first new material in two years. The song, a dedication to the Iranian woman shot by the repressive regime operating in Tehran, is sonically a mash-up of "Innocence" and "Wishing Well;" though here there is a palatable hollowness, perhaps intentional, suggested by gaps between lyrical couplets. Thematically, they call it a "prayer for the dissidents" or a hope that the least powerful among us have the symbolic power to tilt the universe.

On The List [Photos] :: Airborne Toxic Event @ Slim's [San Francisco 4.8.09]

This is an update and addition to the Airborne Toxic Event review we posted from last week. First of all, great show and I only half did the experience justice. They are an incredibly gracious and warm group of folks. Not a bad word to say about them. We did get our hands on some great live shots from a friend of the band we met quickly backstage. He was down with sharing them and you can look through the whole stream over at flickr.

The Airborne Toxic Event :: In the back of a van

We've got exciting news from The Airborne Toxic Event. Not only does their first LP come out on August 5, they're also recording 10 acoustic versions of songs off the album in the 10 weeks leading up to the release. We're up to week five and arguably the strongest acoustic translation(as well as one of their best recorded tracks), "Does This Mean You're Moving On?" They recorded this version the back of a van speeding down Sunset Blvd. Lead-singer, Mikel Jollett introduced the song when they blew the doors off Pianos back in June with, "This next one is a dance song. But if you listen to the lyrics, it's really quite sad." True words from the man in the middle.


"Does This Mean You're Moving On" (Acoustic)

Airborne Toxic Event :: LP (S/T)

Today is August 5 and The Airborne Toxic Event album is descending on music retailers like an infectious cloud. I know the kids aren't really into buying records these days. I know most bands only have two good songs. And I know that we're all too cynical for our own good. Which is why it's so important that you find a way to listen to this album.

From album opener "Wishing Well," to the massive closer "Innocence" the band's first self-titled LP is diverse, more than a little epic and as approachable a rock album as you've heard in a while. "Sometime Around Midnight" is the clear stand-out, with a second-half that causes some people to wonder if this band couldn't end up playing stadiums when all is said and done. And there are smaller songs like "Does This Mean You're Moving On?," a heart-breaking ode to jealousy in New York City. This is a band that traffics in post-punk, synth-rock, 1950s throw-back and it's all packaged with literate lyrics from a lead-singer who used to write novels. 

I'll leave you with an acoustic version of the band's single, "Sometime Around Midnight" and while you're listening, go find the record and buy it. I promise it'll be in your end-of-the-year Top 10. It might be in my Top 2. 

"Sometime Around Midnight" (Acoustic)

Top 50 of 2008 :: 5-2 [Is your heart still beating?]

5) Airborne Toxic Event - "Sometime Around Midnight"




Airborne Toxic Event wrote one of the most secretly destructive albums of the year. The songs were catchy; the melodies bouncy. There was no sense that the entire album was actually about break-ups, mortgaging your future, and being absolutely destroyed by a woman. It helped that their lead-singer and lyricist Mikel Jollet used to be a novelist. One can assume, a really morose novelist. Which brings us to "Sometime Around Midnight," a song about going out, trying to get over the girl you love, and having her go home with someone else - right in your face, seemingly to prove a point. I mean, he puts it more eloquently than that but you get the gist. From there it's about walking out of a bar so drunk that you don't realize, "everyone's staring at you." The closer is the pathos and breakdown. Jollet screams, "you just have to see her/you just have to see her/you know that she'll break you in two." It's fragile. It's demanding and it's prophetic. The best part: the guitars and arena-style arrangement that explode around Jollet as he finds the place where he can handle his miniature disaster. It's tragic as hell. It might break you in two.

4) Mates of State - "The Re-Arranger"

It starts plodding and meditative before moving into something more urgent, and eventually finding a pedantic but resonating final call. What makes "The Re-Arranger" so perfect is not that it is one good song; it's that it is two, and maybe three separate good songs - all dealing with the same issue. Ostensibly, the song is about trying to recover a relationship. Essentially, "if you really wanna shake it off/you gotta re-arrange us." This can happen. Things can go wrong and they can be fixed; but how that happens is always a larger and more complicated problem. Mates of State have never presented nuanced solutions but they have always managed to put a pretty face on an ugly situation. So, they pull out a bridge which, we can assume, is about the value and productive quality of vicious, shouting arguments. "Love loud/don't lose loud" is a different way of saying you'd rather fight than not talk at all. "Love loud/ don't lose loud" is a little like stuffing a rainbow up the asshole of a disaster. But sometimes you need to do that. Sometimes you need to believe that you can do the re-arranger. Sometimes you need to re-arrange us.

3) We Are Scientists - "After Hours"




We Are Scientists took a great leap forward this year and no one noticed. Their album, Brain Thrust Mastery was a combination of dangerous power-pop and Duran Duran synth-slick ambitiousness. It wasn't With Love and Squalor. But it didn't try to be. And "After Hours" was the third best song of the year. It was huge. More than that, it was ready and willing to be huge. The lyrics were about going out drinking in New York, trying to stay out as late as possible, and challenging the nerve of bartenders to close their bars. It doesn't necessarily have a lot to say but that's less of an issue. It charges forward with no regard for personal safety as the band ends up demanding, "say/that you'll stay." It bleeds togetherness. It bleeds those early hours and late nights and times that are always running out. It bleeds the here and it bleeds the now. "This door is always open." And no one has the guts to shut us out.

2) The Killers - "Human"

In a year that embraced electro, disco and synthesizers like never before, we needed someone to bring us back down. Someone to bring it back down, bring it back down tonight. And ironically, it was one of the most digestible (read: "vapid" if you're a hater) synth-rock bands of the last 10 years who had a mind to do it. Brandon Flowers and The Killers, chipping off a Hunter S. Thompson lyric questioning our humanity, managed to pose a grammatically incorrect, if dreadfully important question: are we human or are we dancer? You gotta let me know. And the case was, we are dancer. We've gathered up our innately human qualities and taken them down to the electro-house pawn shop and all we got in trade was "D.A.N.C.E." Flowers is almost demanding to know why we've let ourselves become a breed of kids who plugged so deeply into the main-frame, so intimately into the scene, and so mindlessly into the disco that we can't define our humanity. Are we human or are we dancer? I probably can't do this better justice than what I wrote the day the song leaked. So, go back and read that. It's just new tab and Google in your browser and search for "Human" and "32ft" and then click search and select from your search options the link that best describes the your desired location. Plug in. Shut off. And God help us all if that MGMT record is the best thing the kids can get down to. Give my regards to soul and romance. They did the best they could.

Goodnight, sweet blog

On this date six years ago I began this website with a rudimentary understanding of web publishing and a fist-full of press contacts acquired through a bit of music writing and a brief if bizarre tour through Virgin/Capitol Records. I remember feeling, even then, ambivalent about how long I would write the site or if - far more likely - I would lose interest in a few months, dropping it like so many halfway affectations and hobbies of the American bourgeoisie. Six years and 1,211 posts later, here we are at the end.

Writing on this website taught me to write. I was, by no means, a "hack" when this began, and I am, by no means, an excellent writer now, but somewhere in those few thousand paragraphs I wrote here over the last six years, I figured out the beginnings of a voice, refined a few chronic errors, learned to swear less and then began swearing again. I got political exactly once, my first attempt at a longer music/culture piece. Of all the musicians I tried to break to an audience before they were popular, I am most proud to have stood against "Stop and Frisk" in 2011, long before it became the basis of an NYC Mayoral campaign. It is an undeniable tautology, but I wouldn't be here this way without having written for this website. It was never about making money, and I rejected advertising, even back in 2011 when the web-stats indicated I was relevant enough to court. A profit model could not possibly reason through a labor of unsexy love.

Writing on this website introduced me to enormously great musicians, many of whom happen to be great people. Taylor Rice of Local Natives, Jon Lawless of First Rate People, John Ross of Challenger, Blair Gimma of Blair and Future of What, Kyle Wilson of Milagres, Mikel Jollett of Airborne Toxic Event all gave their time and energy graciously to keeping up with me and allowing me into their process a bit, and I tried my best to give words to their wonderful music. There are so many others that there isn't time or space to list here.

I thank my friends for whom this website was originally intended, and I thank my readers. Not so much the 700,000 of you that ended up here one way or another, most by accident or for a few seconds from the Hype Machine, but the few hundred of you strangers who were my regular readers. I never knew the wide majority of you, and only a few of you ever wrote to me personally. Still, I wrote for you. Seeing the few hundred people who stopped by every day made me want to write, ideally to write something better than most blogs I read. I tried writing everyday and mostly failed. You stuck with me, and I appreciate it immensely, invisibly, from far away.

If you want to keep in touch with me, 32feet@gmail.com will still work - though at some point the PR emails may necessitate a switch toward something else - and I'll still maintain @32feet as my Twitter handle, though even this will seem quaint in five years when Twitter isn't a thing anymore.

Julian Barnes has this awesome quote about death in my favorite book, A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters. He writes, "I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it." Of course, you don't realize the line is about death the first time you read it - which is another one of those truisms about human experience: there's no way to consider endings from beginnings. I would like to believe I am more clear-eyed than most on this front, but there was never time or space to consider what would happen when I stopped wanting to write 32ft/second or what it would feel like to write these words saying goodbye.

It was always about gravity or some other inexorable, ineluctable force. We would return; the beginning and the end would become themselves again. As Kierkegaard noted, the problem with life is that it is lived forward and understood in reverse. We are always cast backwards toward our future. Or as Britt Daniel sang, "I'm writing to you in reverse." I felt that way too sometimes. This was a diary of my late 20s and early 30s, what I liked and when I liked it and what I sounded like then. This both is and was that. Make sure you dance and sing, no one's gonna tell and there's no film in that camera. This is the dream of waking up.

Top 50 Songs of 2009 :: 50-41 [Have some courtesy and keep it in your sleeve]

50. The Sweet Serenades - "On My Way"

There is something vaguely aerobic about The Sweet Serenades' "On My Way." It pounds out of the gate and the back-beat panting manages to hold out just long enough to tumble into a quivering, crystalline chorus. It is fragile, shabby, and entirely propulsive. Turn yourself, and this, up.

49. War Tapes - "Dreaming of You"

An American Editors mixed with a Cure cover-band, up the drama a little and you're in the zip code of War Tapes' "Dreaming of You." That is, of course, until the 3-minute mark when the whole arrangement grinds to a halt, only to explode in one of those, "Is My Heart Going To Pop?" chord progressions. At that point, there is an edge to this band, an aggression that isn't common to a first sentence rife with comparisons to other bands. War Tapes are going for broke, and for that, no one can fault them. And for that, they gave us one of the biggest moments of the year.

48. New Roman Times - "Smoke In Your Disguise"

New Roman Times have a publicist who likes to compare them to Airborne Toxic Event. I like to compare them to Sweden's Moonbabies. The power is in the imagery, an imagination that places us as conspirators needing to get away together. The boy-girl vocals of the chorus, repeating, "But you are breaking my heart," aren't the killer. But the image of being the smoke in someone elses' disguise, the image of being the the getaway car for someone elses' robbery, is powerful. They wax philosophical, "I'll be there when you fall apart/I'll be the smoke in your disguise." Fair enough, as the guitars crash and the arrangement spills over the top of the glass.

47. My First Earthquake - "Cool In The Cool Way"

My First Earthquake, for the record, are cool in the cool way. But in that more terrifying conception of "coolness" where having a creative disdain for what is "cool," in effect makes you cool. Their single, "Cool In The Cool Way" is all about embracing your nerdiness in a world that forces American Apparel and Urban Outfitters down the the throats of unsuspecting and confused American youth. Are you afraid of slap bracelets because someone told you they could cut your wrist off? But then later you embraced them in an attempt to keep up and despite your fears, only to find that "cool" had moved on? Well, this is the opposite of that. You've got a robot name, Becca, and that's awesome.

46. Red Wire Black Wire - "Locked Out"

"Locked Out" is a tumbling piece of synth-rock by a band with a name that implies exactly the kind of explosiveness that reveals itself in the down, down, downbeat of the second verse. Of course, the narrative is about a suffocating moment when you lose the girl you're with to some older, strong, behind-closed doors guy. If you listen closely, it's depressing. But, there's an element of "we don't have to take this" in the midst of all the self-conscious anger and micro-management. But you'll find yourself singing along to "I know that I'm a bother/and it's hard to refuse an offer/and you've already got a father/and I always play the martyr/But I'm locked out." Now, it's time to blow the place to bits.

45. Alex Metric - "Head Straight"



There are times when, especially in the indie rock circle, you feel like you're going to lose it. Everything is so carefully done and even the dance music isn't always Dance Music. So, with relief, Alex Metric storms out with a straight club banger. "Head Straight" charges out of the gates with no other purpose than to explode in a chorus with tumbling drums, synth-stabs and not an ounce of self-reflection. Metric intones, "I keep up/I reach out/Crying, 'Get my head straight.'" He's all about getting yourself together, about not losing your mind. With a humming, buzzing, breakdown the doors cut, "Head Straight" does it.


44. Deleted Scenes - "Fake IDs"

"Fake IDs" takes on the challenge of identity in a world becoming rapidly more and more dishonest. Instead of bemoaning this loss of connection to Truth, Deleted Scenes head the other direction, insisting, "I don't mind you lying to me/if you think you're right, you must be." Later, they reflect that, "We all have fake IDs." They aren't talking about breaking the law but they are talking about the lies we tell each other and ourselves. Who we are is far more contextual than it is independently real. With ethereal, powerful vocals Deleted Scenes are like a more credible Fleet Foxes with a bubbling keyboard riff to drive your mind through a series of, frankly, tough conversations about the veracity of the universe.

43. Stricken City - "Small Things"

An angular, pissed-off, echoing post-punk record, Stricken City gave us Songs About People I Know. The centerpiece was the turn it up and turn it out, "Small Things." The track doesn't fully take off until after the bridge but, from 2.20 on, it turns into a stumbling, chanting, sweaty sing-a-long. Lead-singer, Rebekah Raa leads us down alleyways and we find something that, at volume and the right time of night, might just break you in half.

42. Deer Tick - "Easy"

Deer Tick are from my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. When they perform, they raise the state's flag with them and it is emblazoned with only one word, "Hope." Of course, lead-singer, John McCauley, doesn't sound particularly hopeful; more like he's been up half the night drinking Beam and smoking Reds. And this is the charm: Hope amidst the backdrop of disappointment, hurt and anger. On "Easy," McCauley is himself, gravely and propulsive. The guitars clatter around him and the harmonies sound like they were written on the back of a cocktail napkin at Captain Seaweeds. That's a Providence-reference and I hope you know it.

41. The Thermals - "Now We Can See"

I spent most of the summer in Los Angeles, California driving around in a rented Kia with a sattilite radio hook-up. Between driving down to the ocean and out east to Silverlake, we spent a lot of time in the car and got awfully comfortable with the college radio feed that came through XM. The Thermals cut "Now We Can See" was in heavy rotation and, without exaggeration, Noah and I probably heard it 40-50 times in the month of July. I didn't love it - until I did. By the time I was hitting the airport back east, the song's hook-infested chorus, and its "oh-way-oh" group-vocal, were firmly planted in my mind. This is power-pop at its finest. And if you get through without wanting to growl, "Now we can see/the warnings and signs/read in between the lines/like writing on the wall," well, you might need to listen to it again. Say, 40 or 50 times.

32ft/Sec's 2010 Rarities Collection

We hope you enjoyed our week long feature of the Top 50 Songs of 2010.  In addition, we've put together a group of 2010 rarities, songs that you might have missed as the B-side to a single release, a radio session, a cover song, or a live show that we were able to track down. We listen to a lot of music in any given year and occasionally we come across something not everyone gets to hear. It's like Behind The Music for a blog that already spends its time on music that hardly anyone listens to. After the jump, these are those songs:

Kittens Ablaze :: "Doom Gloom Buttercups"

A note: You'll need to find some headphones and your volume knob. You will need to put one of those on and turn the other one up - I assume you'll be able to figure which is which.

Brooklyn's Kittens Ablaze sound absolutely nothing like burning felines but sound like an entire urban-center, set to burn with accelerants introduced at the critical moment for maximum heat and disorder. Sonically speaking, you're dealing with a roughed-around Ra Ra Riot. The guitars sound like early demo Airborne Toxic Event; wide-open and propulsive with a self-conscious shabbiness. The strings offer a melodic component, for if they were replaced by more guitars this would sound like a Built to Spill cover band. With obvious influences on their sleeves, the band remains unconcerned with comparison, setting their view-finders on the sing-along portion of the evening, with fists firmly raised and emotions appropriately moving in one direction or another. A band can only move you if you let yourself be moved. This is why you'll need the headphones and the volume. So at the 2:59 mark, let yourself feel something. It's there to be felt.

Listen :: Kittens Ablaze - "Doom Gloom Buttercups"

Friday Wrap :: Action Painters, Plastic Operator, Sparrow House, Broken West

It's been a long week and I appreciate you sticking it out. We've been a little short on new music around here (really, Bloc Party, Al Hammond and Airborne Toxic Event are good but you knew that.). So, we'll roll with a bunch of new stuff for Friday afternoon; a little news, some songs, and a few polite requests.

You remember Action Painters, right? We posted their song, "Supermarket" about a month ago and it straight up destroyed everyone. It was bouncy and will certainly anchor their new record due out in the fall. The band hasn't been sleeping. They're up for The Deli Magazine's Band of the Month. You can go here and vote for them. Last I checked, they were in an absolute dog-fight with Age Of Rockets. Let's make a difference and throw weight at this. Really, go vote. Right. Now. Also, they're playing the Bowery with another one of our favorite bands, Tigercity, on July 19th. If you're in New York, you really can't miss that. Look out for updates or just spin "Supermarket" again and remember why this matters.

Listen :: Action Painters - Supermarket

In other news, we've been spinning the shit out of this band Plastic Operator. They sound a little like Her Space Holiday but they've got harder edges than that. It's electro-pop with a few more organic elements thrown in and I guess you could say it's similar to The Postal Service or Mixtapes and Cellmates (the band that played about half a CMJ show). It's good and it'll storm it's way into your iPod without asking questions.

Listen ::
Plastic Operator - Home0207
Plastic Operator - Why Don't You
Plastic Operator - Peppermint

Sparrowhouse, the side project of Voxtrot jack-of-all trades Jared Van Fleet, has some new material out. It's predictably quiet and predictably weird. I was laying bed yesterday feeling sorry for myself and I played this strange, looping, bird-chirping, floor-squeeking entry, "emptycage." I couldn't tell if it was awesome or awful. It's both peaceful and foreboding. It's a rather simple, breathy organ progression but there's something haunting about it. Van Fleet and I are facebook friends and it doesn't get any weirder than that.

Listen :: Sparrowhouse - emptycage and off the last EP :: Sparrowhouse - When I Am Gone

Finally, we're going to send you over to The Indie Music Filter for a new song by The Broken West. I sent the mp3 to a friend yesterday and she said, "it's a little regular. I got nothing from it but a well constructed pop song." At some point this became negative. And on some levels, I agree, there isn't much complicated happening here. But, if well-constructed pop songs have gone out of style, we should all turn in our headphones and quit. I will admit, the opening 30-seconds are the best. It kind of levels off after that.

Listen :: The Broken West - Perfect Games (courtesy of The Indie Music Filter, a great blog besides this one)

[CMJ]White Belt Yellow Tag :: "Remains"

It seems sometimes that rock and roll has lost its sense of size. In 2010, especially at a music festival ironically known for "breaking artists big," it is almost heresy to play big rock music built for large groups and maybe mass appeal. Far easier, in today's climate, to build a few decks of keyboards and sampling machines, make music that sounds like it was recorded at the end of a wind tunnel and do the whole thing with a straight, miserable face [Editor's note: I also like a lot of this type of music]. But, where is the room for the big bands making something maybe more ambitious? White Belt Yellow Tag are in this second category, with an enormous promotional mp3, "Remains," and by all reports, a stunner of a live show. Gravitating toward the post-punk end of things, it is at once big, thundering and completely awesome, if the last two minutes of Airborne Toxic Event's "Sometime Around Midnight" were re-imagined by Editors. The question is whether or not a music festival as big as CMJ has room for a band this size?

Listen :: White Belt Yellow Tag - "Remains"

White Belt Yellow Tag play their last CMJ show tonight at Drom at 10:30.