All Tiny Creatures - "An Iris" [Feat. Justin Vernon]

On All Tiny Creatures latest LP, Harbors, out this past Tuesday, the band continues to craft some of the best hushed, chamber pop available. "An Iris" roots in a spinning guitar loop and ethereal, sailing vocals with, of course, an assist from Bon Iver/Volcano Choir genius Justin Vernon. It is driving and propulsive without necessarily trying to be, finding a certain beauty in repetition or expansion on a theme; the kind of thing you've been listening to for 3:33 and it easily could have been a not unpleasant hour. Heads nod unconsciously, you strain to make out the lyrics. Mix Loney, Dear with shades of UK super-producer Clock Opera and you'll arrive at a soft little center All Tiny Creatures have found inside all this chaos. They embrace a certain cacophony, though they've rubbed the sharp edges from it and commanded it into rhythm. A cocoon, a compass - choose the image - but it is something shimmering and sensible floating on the deck of a surging sea.

Listen :: All Tiny Creatures - "An Iris" [Feat. Justin Vernon]
Listen :: All Tiny Creatures - "Glass Bubbles"

LCD Soundsystem :: "Dance Yrself Clean" @ Terminal 5 [3.29.11]

Being one of the privileged 25,000 people - and a statement of this absurdity should communicate some of the cultural impact of this event - who will get to see LCD Soundsystem's  finishing kick this week, I feel rather un-uniquely positioned to say something about it. In fact, despite Murphy's urging for us to just, you know, "be here" instead of photographing everything, I suspect this run of shows will be one of the most widely documented and discussed series of concerts New York's history.

Last night, LCD Soundsystem opened with "Dance Yrself Clean", very nearly exploding Terminal 5, a venue most known for its dearth of emotional character and poor sight lines. Anyone in the building will always have those first five snare hits (4:05 above), the flashing strobes and all your friends, people you did and didn't know, going absolutely bananas, turning the floor into a gurgling, carbonated cluster of human energy. Thus, began a three-hour odyssey, a journey between band and audience. Never have I seen a New York crowd give of itself so unconsciously, perhaps because never has a band ever so egregiously and unpretentiously offered itself to us. LCD Soundsystem, we love you (but nothing) and this feels like a real event and we're happy to be a part of it, all of it, really.

On The List :: The Joy Formidable @ The Met, Providence, RI [3.28.11]

The Joy Formidable's Ritzy Bryan has the biggest eyes in rock music. She opens her lids wide in a mixture of menace, dare, excitement and, of course, joy. All these emotions and impulses made, as stares at her audience, simply by arching and hiding her eyebrows beneath her jagged, bleach blond bangs. This says nothing of her and her bandmates' mercurial qualities, an explosive mixture of spinning and thrash. It is a little thing, Ritzy Bryan's high eyebrows and her piercing blue eyes, but for a band so open on stage, so engaging with their fans and so giving of their energy, the evening in Providence was about letting their audience in, and without doing the whole pedantic, windows-to-the-soul thing, we see her, and more importantly, she sees us.

The Joy Formidable, a band we've seen in a range of venues from Brooklyn basements to opening for Passion Pit at Terminal 5, opened their set at the Met in Providence with "Greyhounds In The Slips", a song about getting out of town, before ramming the latest album stunner, "Magnifying Glass" into the first five rows of the audience. It is a Monday night in a second-rate northeastern city, and there are maybe 50 people crowding the front - it is not New York by a mile - but Ritzy and Rhydian run into each other and motor around the stage like this is the most important show of their year. This is their charm and their gift. In this moment, as they move to play "Austere", they are the best band in the world.

They play "The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade" and the massive "Cradle" before answering a request from the front row. A girl, maybe of high school age, had asked for the quieter "9669" and Ritzy looks directly at her, big eyes again, and says, "This is for you." It is a simple and winning moment. The band closes their set with "Bouy" and a prolonged and feedback-heavy version of "Whirring," the latter of which ends with Rhydian throwing his bass and Ritzy ripping the strings off her guitar. It is a weekday night in Providence and the band will have to restring their instruments tomorrow before the tour goes on and they do all this again; build, destroy, build again. The lyrics of "Greatest Light" nearly still ringing in the rafters, "This dream is in a telescope now." Eyes open, with magnification, audience and band look right at each other, closer than ever.

Listen :: The Joy Formidable - "Cradle"

YACHT :: "Dystopia"

Never having been any special fan of YACHT, there was considerable confusion about his newest release Shangri-La on DFA this summer. Questionable was meeting credible. Despite all of Jona's documented exuberance, none of his songs caught my attention, perhaps owing to the fact that he opened for LCD Soundsystem at Webster Hall one night in 2007 and danced around alone to an iPod while the crowd kind of watched and kind of thought he sucked. Hours later Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash would be viciously thrown into the scorer's table by the Spurs' Robert Horry, or, roughly what it felt like to listen to YACHT's set. With little reason to think of the band in the intervening years - despite my fond memory of the rest of that evening - they were an effective non-entity to me. All this leads to "Dystopia", the first look at Jona's DFA debut, a song with enough fun to explode all my rational or irrational negativity. It gives hints of the apocalypse and the end of everything. So, during the same week that James Murphy officially moves from being a recording artist to a label suit, let's spend some time with a kid that he's just begun working with. The old world always has to die. The question is, what gets built on the ashes? Jona puts it more simply, "the earth, the earth is on fire." And here, there may be second chances in what is being lost.

Listen :: YACHT - "Dystopia"

Fucked Up :: "The Other Shoe"

Arguably the most esoteric hardcore band ever, Fucked Up will return this summer with an 18-track punk opera entitled, David Comes To Life. Lead track, "The Other Shoe", only the first of four song previews to be released in the coming weeks, somehow finds a addictive hook sung by an adorable female voice amidst surging guitars and Damien Abraham's screamed lyrics. The downbeat picks up steam and the band continues to return to the chorus, "We're dyin' on the inside/dyin' on the inside" even with the addition of momentary halcyon guitars at the top of the mix that recall more mid-career U2 than NOFX. It is allegedly about turning these broken insides out. But Abraham demurs, "new lyrics follow the same old meaning", in some declaration of an attempted new world, this grand collision between so much delicacy and so much rage. For a band whose name both violates the New York Times' editorial guidelines and also ends up being mentioned in the papers' pages, these type of disjoints square the circle. Feel furious, afraid and smile just a bit.

Listen :: Fucked Up - "The Other Shoe"

Friska Viljor :: "The Beginning of the Beginning of the End" [LP]

The Swedish two-some Friska Viljor release their newest record The Beginning of the Beginning of the End today. It can be streamed in its entirety below, an all-night, stomping brass party full of hooks and memorable refrains. It reads like a Beirut record if the descriptors "languid" and "reflective" were imediately replaced by "wide-open" and "accelerate". The lyrics deal with some incessant heartbreak, but if lead single and first track, "Larionov" is any indication, there remains a certain hope in this slow-motion emotional train wreck. Or, put another way, don't let the lyrical content get you too far down when the melodies stay floating somewhere over all of us.

Friska Viljor - The Beginning of the Beginning of the End by Cryingbob

Cults - "You Know What I Mean"

Immediately a leading contender for song of 2011, Cults' "You Know What I Mean" takes the vague 1950s swing that colored offerings like last year's Best Coast record or the Tennis release, and distills it into a two-part stomp. Opening with innocent snaps and a melody that is very nearly the Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)", the arrangement takes a turn for the bombastic, throwing reverb and snare under the same simple snaps, all backed by a wide sweeping set of strings. The delicate becomes furious, the cute elements of a sing-song refrain in metamorphosis toward something else, still brittle but entirely uncompromising.

You Know What I Mean by cultscultscults