I went to see Nobunny in the Knitting Factory in Williamsburg. He is a bunny. And a nutcase. It was full. Somewhere over 50% of the crowd seemed to stagedive. One man over six feet in height stagedove onto a woman under 5’3″ at one point. Someone bought me a can of PBR because they said I looked super-friendly.
None of it made sense. I’m writing it off as opposite day. And drawing a line under New York. POSTS ABOUT IRELAND FROM TOMORROW
+
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, something’s awry here. You’ve been scrolling and scrolling, all the way back to the Long Long Ago, and you can’t find anything. Where are all the musicals?
Well I’m going to shock you. I don’t go to see a lot of musicals. Excluding Christmas pantos, I had been to one, ever, before this summer. But circumstances conspired, and I ended up in the Eugene O’Neill Theatre watching Antibalas warm the crowd up for FELA!
Here’s some background. Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra are an afrobeat band based in Brooklyn. They’re ‘contemporary’, in the sense that they were actually around in Nigeria in the 70s, but their sound is so respectful and rooted in that era that calling them a ‘modern take’ is a bit foolish. Their leader, tenor saxophonist Stuart D. Bogie, is Dave Sitek from TV On The Radio’s session musician of choice. The collaborators list is ridiculous. Seun and Femi Kuti and Tony Allen have sat in with Antibalas, but it’s possibly best to just block quote the people Bogie has played with:
He has shared stage and/or studio with the Wu Tang Clan, Medeski Martin and Wood, Public Enemy, Celebration, The Roots, Paul Simon, Harlem Shakes, Burning Spear, Zach De La Rocha, Massive Attack, Scarlett Johansen, Mark Ronson, Saul Williams, Passion Pit, Tony Allen, Sinead O’Connor, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, The El Michaels Affair, Baaba Maal, Bat for Lashes, DJ Logic, Brian Jackson, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rana, Dub is a Weapon, Congo Ashanti Roy, Kologbo, Tunde WIlliams, Ticklah, Paul Cox, Renata, Colin Stetson, Foals, Matt Bauder, Matthew Lux, Toby Summerfield, Crush, Kill, Destroy, Fire of Space, The Eternal Buzz Brass Band, Geoff Mann, Recloose, Evan Hause, Reverend Vince Anderson, Chin Chin, The Sharp Things, The Fu Arkist-Ra, Dick Griffin (of Sun Ra’s Arkestra), Vincent Chancey, Steve Swell, Joe McGinty, Tom Abs, Shoko Nagai, Jeremy Wilms, Larry MacDonald, Butch Morris, Bill Brovold and Larval, Caural, Victor Rice, Dragons of Zynth, The Loser’s Lounge, State Radio, Gomez, Brightblack Morning Light, Holly Miranda, Noba, Miles Anthony Benjamin Robinson, Centralia, Wild Yaks, Oren Blowedow, Michael Leonhart and The Get Hustle.
He has also arranged strings for Spencer Day, James Harries and Ben Jonas.
This musical though, you’d have to presume, is a highlight in itself for Mr. Bogie. While Kevin Mambo and Sahr Ngaujah split time as Fela Kuti in the musical, telling the story and singing the songs, it’s Bogie at the back of the stage tearing ribbons out of people’s faces as The Saxophone Of Fela Kuti. Not the kind of thing you’d plan for, but it’s hard to think of a higher honour for an afrobeat player than that.
The story’s done with obvious added glitz, but it’s respectful. Fela was a big personality (and a bit of a lunatic) in reality too, so it’s not too jarring. We are introduced to The Shrine, Fela’s club opposite his house in a run-down area of Lagos. We are told by the programme that The Shrine features, on any given night, anti-government lectures, Yoruba rituals, strange dancing and, obviously, Fela music. But many people are here not because they want to see the story of Fela played out (or because their friend likes Antibalas and didn’t want to go by himself) – they’re here because it says ‘Presented by Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’ on the marquee. So they need to know. What’s Fela music?
This is done beautifully well. Fela tells all. First there’s Yoruba music. African ritual drumming, chanting. But that’s the time before. ‘Highlife’ is the Nigerian popular music of his youth. It’s all celebratory horns and uptown jazz party etiquette. So when he goes to London to study medicine like his brothers… he learns how to play jazz instead. He comes back. A guy from Sierra Leone is dressing up as James Brown and playing a close iteration of his funk. He’s a dope, Fela feels, but there’s something to it. Then there’s Tito Puente. “Ethnic” rhythms gaining attention in the popular sphere.
‘Let me break it down for you’, he says, and then ‘now I will put it back together’. The rhythms start. ‘Not Afro-Cuban drums. My drums.’ Two guitars, one chopping and one crawling a riff. ‘Those guitars. That’s not James Brown. That’s AFROBEAT’. The backing vocals emerge. ‘African singing’. Something’s missing. ‘What’s missing? Take a guess’. Real, deep bass. No tone, not like funk bass. Then Fela picks up his red saxophone (and Stuart D. Bogie does too), and there’s no-one in the room left confused about what Fela music is.
If you don’t know the story of Fela’s life, here’s the key points: his mother’s a Marxist who was murdered by the government, his music is great, the government hate him, he starts to get political, he gets beaten up a lot, he goes mental, he thinks about leaving Nigeria, he doesn’t leave Nigeria.
For the rest, go see Fela. I’m sure you can get those Christmas flights or something. Or maybe just read the Wikipedia.
But I was there for the music more than the show, and that was sensational. Water No Get Enemy, Fela’s single, watertight, perfect contribution to the world of music, soundtracks the whole second half of the show, through torture, indecision and soul-searching. And the solo on his hit, Zombie, is the aural equivalent of closing your eyes, walking towards a group of people and slashing the air with a knife.
But like I said with Budos, I don’t know how to talk about this sort of music. It was great. This is Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Listen to him.
+
viaCRLS
In the most recent issue of the L Magazine, Todd Goldstein from ARMS says the following:
The C-word – chillwave – or whatever… I think some of it is so boring, The sounds are beautiful, and I think that’s what makes people excited, but they’re not actual songs, you know?
Now, ARMS are terrible, but there is some truth in this. A couple of days after the Grizzly Bear gig that cause me to leak effusion out of every journalistic pore, I returned to Governor’s Island with a crew to chill on the fake beach and see Neon Indian.
Chillwave is something that completely passed me by. It’s actually difficult to talk about it in terms that aren’t completely ripped from Hipster Runoff (who invented the name, to Pitchfork’s chagrin). I enjoyed Deadbeat Summer in the two weeks it sat on my car-shop €15 mp3 player, and I didn’t hate it when I heard it after that, but in general I’m with Mr. Goldstein. It’s the reason I get unreasonably angry with people who think Person Pitch is better than any Animal Collective album, too. Because something sounds nice when you’re barely paying attention doesn’t make it good music (though that’s unfair to Person Pitch, which is a great album in its own right).
So, in surroundings that, as evidenced by Morning Benders, Caribou and Grizzly Bear gig visits, would make almost anything seem a little transplendent, Neon Indian was shown up. The hype that surrounded the Neon Indian-Washed Out-Memory Tapes-general chillwave rise to “relevance” was the most self-aware imaginable, and it was factual proof that irony, while not in itself disagreeable, can end up lumping you with baggage you don’t want.
Five bands played this show. Miniature Tigers, Prefuse 73, Dom, Nite Jewel and Neon Indian. None of the above did anything to merit even listening to after the fact. Miniature Tigers were the best. Dom, easily, were the worst, and barely even knew their own set. But it was Neon Indian’s name on the top of the bill, and it was their show to disappoint.
Governor’s Island, as the name implies, is an island.It is thus relatively difficult to leave. It was full to capacity (c. 3.5k), or close, at about dusk. There were less than 500 actually in front of the stage by the time Neon Indian ended. Democracy doesn’t work a lot of the time, but when ears don’t hear what they want, feet walk, and that’s what happened.
There was some merit in sitting on sand, away from generally bored and sarcastic friends, and trying to ‘chill hard’ to Deadbeat Summer, while it lasted, but no amount of talking around it would make this a good gig. It might be easier to hear ten tracks of pseudo-tropical gloop on an iPod while you’re refreshing Facebook than it is to listen to (for example) Adebisi Shank, but it’s definitely not as rewarding, and there’s nothing like big speakers, a big stage and a big crowd to show that up.
-
Sorry Brooklyn Vegan, again. Some day I will buy a good camera.
If you’ve read a couple of these reviews, you’ve probably noticed that I go to almost exclusively free gigs. Well, no. Completely exclusively free gigs. It takes a freak accident or a ridiculously generous friend who can’t get out of work for that trend to be bucked. Owing to the latter, against $40 odds (that’s about 10 days of staying alive), I found myself on the ferry again to Governor’s Island.
There’ve been some incredible shows. Caribou on Governor’s will be one of those hazy, reverie-type memories for as long as my memory lasts. Sonic Youth was like a Greek statue, a perfect museum-piece of what a Sonic Youth gig in Brooklyn was going to be like in my head. HEALTH was loud. But this one was the best.
I got to the island slightly late, because it turns out time is linear rather than cyclical, as I had previously thought. As I queued at the “Will Call” stand, Gang Gang Dance put down what sounded like a pretty intense set for a first support. I made my way past the drinks wristband guy, confident in the knowledge that the $1.30 in my pocket wasn’t going to buy me anything worth having, and crossed the fake beach one more time to take up residence in front of Hamilton Leithauser and the Walkmen.
Bows + Arrows is the only Walkmen album I ever paid any attention to, and even though I liked it a lot at the time, it’s been scrolled past consistently for nearly five years now. Still, open mind. They’re a strange band to watch.
Since Bows + Arrows, they’ve slowed down and calmed down a little, but there’s still the feeling that Leithauser is an overstuffed straw doll, bursting at the seams and malfunctioning sadly a little even when the melodies are happy. You can take Hamilton Leithauser’s hands out of his tailored trouser pockets, but you can’t take the hands-in-pockets out of Hamilton Leithauser. They play okay, with a little bit too much of what seems like self-regard on the slower ones, and they criminally skip P4K’s 20th best track of the 2000s.
None of that, nearly 400 words in, is relevant to why this was the best gig of the summer and one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen. That was what came next, after a rain shower, some crew panic, a feud between poncho-wearers and “Williamsburg pansy pricks” with umbrellas and a delay of at least a half an hour. Grizzly Bear.
It’s been long established that Grizzly Bear are an awe-inspiringly tight and excellent live band, but this was something else. They came out and opened with an almost unrecognisable version of Showcase from Horn of Plenty that sounded like what Radiohead probably wish In Rainbows sounded like live, spotless, skewed and gigantic. Then it was into Southern Point and no more surprises till the encore.
Scale changes the experience at shows, and even though it was wet, the twin key factors of volume and lights, not to mention the downtown Manhattan skyline, made it two gears beyond anything I’ve seen them do before. Knife and Two Weeks are the obvious hits, but they seemed like the least impressive things tonight, possibly because they’re made of nothing that has physical effect when pumped out of bus-sized speakers – Two Weeks has no guitar at all and a drum part too intricate to really break up, and Knife is strangely subdued. Crowd singalongs, though, might have made up for the slight dip in energy.
Grizzly Bear’s variation on the Loud-Quiet-Loud formula (Quiet-Quiet-Loud-Quiet-Loud-Loud maybe?) is exponentially more pronounced on stage when they’re actually playing off each other. It’s Chris Bear on drums and Daniel Rossen on guitar who take this to its extreme. The troughs (or oases of calm, would possibly be a better way of putting it) are cowing. Foreground is as fragile these things come. But the peaks are almost destructive. The set’s packed with songs that show this off: Lullabye, the Friend version of Little Brother, I Live With You and While You Wait For The Others all feature impeccably loud, rhythmically untrustworthy wig-out sections.
Without going further down the internal thesaurus route, it’s hard to describe exactly how good this was. I tried taking some notes on my phone, but they’re just garbled nonsense. It’s rare that an entire set, start to finish, is completely captivating, even when it’s a band whose entire catalogue you know well. It was just a perfect combination of set, untouchable talent, location and the fact that I hadn’t even expected to be there until the day.
The set closed with While You Wait For The Others into the second half of On A Neck On A Spit, and even though it was 12.5 songs long, it seemed almost like a cheat, like when a band shows up and plays a 25 minute set. The encore was, again, an unrecognisable Horn of Plenty song, Fix It. After that, it was just three minutes of staring at an empty stage and fighting both sides of an internal Socratic dialogue on whether it was the best live show I’d ever seen.
+++
Showcase (Horn Of Plenty)
Southern Point (Veckatimest)
Cheerleader (Veckatimest)
Lullabye (Yellow House)
Little Brother (Friend)
Knife (Veckatimest)
Fine For Now (Veckatimest)
Two Weeks (Veckatimest)
Ready, Able (Veckatimest)
I Live With You (Veckatimest)
Foreground (Veckatimest)
While You Wait For The Others (Veckatimest)
On A Neck, On A Spit (Second Half) (Yellow House)
Encore: Fix It (Horn Of Plenty)
via Fader, I was at least one mile further away than this.
XX in the Park
Came late, 20k plus there
Sat outside, pretty good.
+
There is a story I wish I could tell you about something that happened at YACHT at the South Street Seaport. It’s a spectacularly unlikely tale that would make you laugh, think and question whether it ever really happened. But I can’t tell you that story, unfortunately.
I can tell you that YACHT aren’t very good, though. If you know YACHT, then you pretty much know that they’re camp as Dachau, with not a whole lot going on except DIY disco and some slogan shouting.
I’ve heard reports of them being a lot of fun, and I don’t deny that in certain situations, they could be a lot of fun. But on this day, at this place, with these climatic conditions and this geopolitical balance, YACHT weren’t a lot of fun.
Their songs are, for the most part, fluff, and despite the fact that maybe two or three could have been worth attention, everything was marred by a drummer who couldn’t keep time to what were obviously quantised beats, and a generally pretty low tightness:trying to make people have fun ratio.
Thumbs down to YACHT. Worth it only because of the thrilling, secret story I can’t tell you.
-
On a certain level, there is nothing to the mythology of music but an infinitely receding series of lists. You could list your favourite use of the sound of a subway going over overground tracks in rap albums, or spend an entire week using lists as an excuse to see if your hits go up when you post every day, or you could go with something a little more universal. Quintessential New York bands? There’s the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, maybe even the Strokes if the hagiography is up to date. Then there’s Sonic Youth.
If you’re still a little doe-eyed about the city (and it does help to stay a little doe-eyed, especially if you’ve been around a while and your friends are starting to say “you look neglected” with an increasing tone of sympathy) there isn’t much more fairytale than Sonic Youth, for free, outdoors in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. In honour of that, I’m going to go back to the “self-indulgent adjective stream” roots of this blog to describe it.
Out of reverence for their status as “game-changers”, Sonic Youth were allowed by Celebrate Brooklyn! to choose their own supports. Onanistically enough, both Talk Normal (drum-heavy, droning krautrock era) and Grass Widow (disaffected college rock era with added synthesis) sound like they’ve spent their bedroom years ripping through the Sonic Youth back catalogue, and food chain economics have left Thurston and Kim listening to the modern day echoes of themselves. Both bands fit the occasion, neither changed lives.
And then there was Sonic Youth. Some bands are so totemic that it seems redundant to even talk about them much any more, but I’m going to try. Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, even though they’re reaching Rolling Stones-esque “too old” territory by most conventional standards, exist in a symbiotic space, with guitars that don’t sit in regular tuning and don’t have any time for regular tunes. The way they interact, at all the different stops between double-silence and double-white noise, is so intuitive that it’s almost shamanic. This is what makes Sonic Youth Sonic Youth, even with voices bad and getting worse, and Steve Shelley missing a beat every now and then.
The set list was almost entirely 80s, and leaned heavily on Daydream Nation, which is further proof of the fact that they’re moving in the direction of what Carles would call a “legacy” band even as they continue to release albums. But it is what it is. It’s The Sprawl into Cross The Breeze with the sun going down in a park. It’s Kim Gordon thanking the swathes of people sitting out the back on the hills on picnic rugs with brown bags and no less enthusiasm, and then ten minutes later singing Shaking Hell from the Confusion Is Sex. It’s not Teen Age Riot, because it never is, but that’s okay.
There’s a sum total of maybe three bands in the world who would get away with a ten minute noise jam at the end of the last song of their encore but, with the lists in mind again, there can’t be many sights better than Thurston Moore with his guitar over the top of his head, rolling it against a mic stand while Kim Gordon is on her knees offering up her bass, Lee Ranaldo is feeding back squalls and Steve Shelley is hitting a cymbal with another cymbal. For ten minutes. Go in cynical, as maybe you should, and it’s a little much. But suspend disbelief and it’s an acid trip version of Hades from the Disney Hercules.
It’s Sonic fucking Youth.
+++
BKV once again responsible for this.
- He was playing at South Street Seaport, as good bands tend to.
- He looks about 16 (he is 19 according to research)
- His band have the exact same cast as a secondary school band. Serious guitar-holding demeanour, unhip clothes, knotted hair. Probably a weed pipe hidden in a sock drawer somewhere and a Led Zeppelin poster on a wall too.
- He is nevertheless an excellent guitar player in the old mould, not afraid to play solos, to bring in melodies other than the main one with his guitar while he sings.
- His songs are psychedelic and rangey, but more in a secondhand record store Deleted 60s Vinyl section way than a Built To Spill or Yo La Tengo kind of way.
- He has a couple of choruses too.
That’s all for this one, I’m trying to get closer to Real Life Now before I go see four more shows.
+
What it would have looked like from the back, if I had been inside the perimeter. via BKvegan
The last time I saw Beach House, I was sitting on mulch in the Body and Soul arena at Electric Picnic, not really keeping it together and unable to understand why it was taking them so long to set up. Detective work later revealed that answer. My memories of that, if I can keep them, will stay with me forever though. It looks kind of like a cross between Super 8 footage and an actual dream, and it sounds like Beach House right before Devotion came out. I’ve never seen them in ordinary circumstances.
And maybe I never will. Rather than spending money I need to spend on 99c pizza slices and cans of Mac and Cheese on actually gaining entry to the Prospect Park Bandshell, it made sense to just find a good piece of grass outside and watch from afar. So that was it. Late as usual, I caught about five songs of Beach House’s support set, possibly all from Teen Dream if memory serves. Take Care billowing out through Prospect Park dusk. Not bad, but honestly, actually seeing Beach House play might have to go a bit higher on the life priority list than it is currently. They are as tight as a politically incorrect joke, and there’s every reason to believe genuine visual contact with Victoria Legrande would help in the communication of her general sultry buzz.
Fun as that was, I had to sit through the National after that. Barring Bruce Springsteen and maybe Tom Waits, there is no music on the planet more people have tried to talk me into saying I like. I think they’re dull, the emotion is forced and often pretty trite, and they’re saved from being out and out AOR by having a badass drummer. Fake Empire, made as usual by the counterintuitive and admittedly pretty deadly drumming, was a reasonably poignant encore, I’ll admit. That far but no further.
+
via Village Voice
Best Coast is divisive. She (Bethany Cosentino, not the cat’s mother, but more on that later) writes short, catchy, reverb-soaked pop songs. That’s what it says in the Dancing About Architecture handbook under Best Coast – What To Actually Say About Her Music. But some people think she’s the purest manifestation of hype as a negative force. She’s going out with Nathan Williams from Wavves, who many thought to be the purest manifestation of hype as a negative force in the 2009 hype cycle. She can barely play the guitar, and her lyric-writing is simplistic to the point of absurdity. Tests are still ongoing, but preliminary results reveal that the word crazy is rhymed with the word lazy around 500 times over the course of Crazy For You, and the old miss you-kiss you pairing is not far behind. She tweets, too, primarily about weed. It’s not the world’s most surprising thing that some people find her annoying.
But sometimes you just have to suck it up, despite yourself. The first four songs on Crazy For You are about as unassailably brilliant as any guitar pop in the last decade. Plus, like most nutcases, she gets more fascinating the more you pay attention. The songs are about loneliness, mostly. But the lyrics take left turns into batshit just about enough to make the crazy-lazy stuff seem a little profound: “Nothing makes me happy, not even TV or a bunch of weed” as if TV and weed were the pinnacle of happiness-pursuit in this century. Or how about “I lost my job, I miss my mom, I wish my cat could talk”? Well, that’s weed talking, maybe, or just a hardline Cat Person being given a microphone for once.
Her cat’s Snacks, by the way. He’s on the cover of Crazy For You, and the cover of King of the Beach by Wavves too, and he has a Twitter. Attempts to get him to do an interview for the blog have proved fruitless so far.
In a roundabout way I suppose I’m trying to say that I went to see Best Coast at South Street Seaport, which has been responsible for more excellent consecutive Friday nights than anything since I was 14 and watching Jools Holland religiously with popcorn and Coke. The show was good. I was a little late, because I tend to be a little late, but when I arrived, she was half a verse through the best pop song of the year, Boyfriend. It could very well be the anti-Single Ladies. The song ends and Bethany – Nate Wavves’ girlfriend, Twitter stoner, HRO feud-starter, public persona – mops up. Literally. “Man it is hot.”
Human after all. She tells us her album is out, and tells us to buy it, download it or not get it all, whichever we like. She plays more songs. She dries herself with a towel. People shout that they love her, an occupational hazard presumably. “Thanks you guys. Hey, who wants this towel?” Some scattered but scarily enthusiastic cheers. “Ew, gross, guys.”
I’m not saying I would have taken Bethany Cosentino’s sweat towel, but as she walked off with last year’s right-so-this-album-is-going-to-be-pretty-fucking-good-when-it’s-done 7″ When I’m With You still resonating around the port, it would have been pretty hard to tell me she was anything but a genius. This is what a couple of years of reclaiming pop via no-fi, lo-fi and Wavves-wave has left us with. Listenable, accessible pieces of retro pop that squat in your brain and stay there so long they claim that they owned it to begin with.
There was also, by the way, more people there for Best Coast than anyone else who’s played so far this summer. Free Energy, following her (criminal line-upping there, powers-that-be), took a good shot, but if you hear the new indie pop, you don’t want to hear 2005′s version and besides, lightning struck about halfway through their set, and that was the end of that.
+
