In the spirit of punk, let's try to keep this short and sweet. Jay Reatard, who I've affectionately dubbed "My Bloody Man", plays lo-fi garage punk so energetic and adrenaline-laced that he barely leaves time for you to breathe. No, actually. In his live show (hell, even in his demos), he leaves absolutely no space between songs. No pause. No break. No hiccup. No fermata. No nothing. Instead, he screams the name of the song he's about to play over the whir of noisy remnants from the last song. You're layered into 30 or so minutes of music, and you aren't allowed to escape. Not even for a second.
Ever since I first saw him on the cover of his album Blood Visions, covered in fake blood, half-naked, with messy hair, I knew it was love at first sight. After I listened to his demo, which is almost as energetic and adrenaline-laced as his live show, I'd realized the taste of Blood was just as alluring as the sight.
Jay Reatard happened to be playing two shows the night I saw him: one sold-out show in Williamsburg opening for Mission of Burma, and another in Jersey which he was headlining. I journeyed into the heart of Hoboken- a long and arduous journey made more difficult by wrong directions and inept police officers. (Shut up okay, I'm an ignorant New Yorker- Jersey is a trek for me). Despite the terror of leaving my venue comfort-zone, Maxwell's is well worth the trip: the space is intimate, unpretentious, and not far from the city once you know how to get there.
I ended up meeting some of the members of the band Tiger! Shit! Tiger! Tiger! from Italy who'd just played Lit Lounge for CMJ. They shared a cab with me, and were generally pleasant people. Unfortunately, we all missed Cola Freaks. Their music is very much in the Jay Reatard vein, except they're from Denmark, not Memphis, Tennessee.
There were no fights this time Jay played. He didn't kick anyone in the face. No one was punched. (Click here) for a youtube link to one of the incidents that, by my estimate, was the most blown out of proportion. The crowd wasn’t outwardly receptive to Jay Reatard at all, minus a group of moshing youngin’s at the front. But in some weird modern perversion of punk energy, despite the relative disinterested expressions in the room, I could feel very positive vibes. At closer look, I noticed people's microscopic headbanging and lips moving ever-so-slightly to mouth lyrics. Occasionally this reserved energy would explode when a crowd favorite was played. While apathy is usually irksome at live shows, the quiet crowd was more of a innocuous foil to the rock n’ roll chaos on stage. Just as abruptly as the set began, Jay Lindsey jumped off stage, his guitar still soaring, and fought his way through the crowd. That was his not-so-subtle clue that the show was over, and there definitely wasn't going to be any encore bull.
For a closer look into his bloody brain, check out his interview with Nardwuar, "The Human Serviette". Oh, Canadians...
Jay Reatard, Maxwell's
Acid Tongue
Jenny Lewis, the reigning queen of quirk-country, recently dropped her latest, Acid Tongue. The smooth and streamlined sophomore effort relies heavily on the raw beauty of her scraping vocals and slick classic country infused with blues and gospel. Flexing her impressively well connected synergy muscle has led to new collaborations with Chris Robinson and She and Him's Zooey Deschannel and M. Ward. Oh, and someone named Elvis Costello. The former blossoming, ginger-haired child star (of Troup Beverly Hills 90210 fame) has blossomed into a thorny scarlet rose with the lyrical chops and arrangement sculpting skills to prove it.
And below, evidence that I should have caught a plane to California on September 13th to see Miss Lewis at the Echo in L.A.
Harlem Arts Ensemble/ Hettie Jones--“Our Inherited Dilemma”
A juxtaposition of introspective poetry reading from Beatnik writer/poet Hettie Jones and jazz performances from the Harlem Arts Ensemble, this was barely your conventional concert. Instead, I found myself in a medium sized performance space on campus, with rows of seats and some delicious refreshments in the back (yum). The Wednesday night show was an insightful look into how poetry and jazz have historically mated, giving birth to cultural transformations.
Serenading us with his gracious piano and soulful voice, Donald Smith started the performance by preaching of “a better world for our children.” Fittingly this notion of changing the world by acknowledging racial oppression, colonialism or war (basically the history behind music making) ties to Hettie Jone’s idea of the “inherited dilemma.” Every one of us carries around some form of cultural weight, whether we want to or not. This weight is inherited throughout history, but it is our personal and perhaps even musical choices that shape how we deal with/ change such cultural dilemmas.
Organize, riot, start a movement, create a revolution…form your identity!
The Harlem Arts Ensemble’s hard bop/free jazz played around with Charlie Mingus styled work-shopping (in-between performance and rehearsal), thrilling solos (“Meditations on Integrations”), and at one point some Latin flavored keys that made my teeth giggle. Jones experimented with extremely interesting breathing and rhythm patterns throughout her poetry readings of “Pale Face”, “Mother America” and “Air Jamaica”, which oddly caused me to hear words in a way I am not quite used to.
The last piece that HAE performed was particularly touching and nearly brought me to tears. The keys were playful and the trumpet melody pulled at my skin as it swayed back and forth. I truthfully don’t think I would have felt as powerful of an emotional towards the piece had it not been for Salim Washington’s explanation of why he wrote it. Knowing the personal history behind the song completely intensified the emotion I gathered from it. Now imagine the effect of one personal history on a song multiplied a thousand-fold--- that is the tremendous emotional effect history has on music or poetry.
For example—watch this modern interpretation of Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” reinterpreted by flute-beat boxer Greg Patillo (who is awesome, check out his stuff), Peter Seymour and Eric Stephenson.
Now watch this historical depiction of the original version… and I’m pretty sure your perception of it will change.
As Jones put it, be “ear-minded, hear the world as you see it.”
TV on the Radio/Wilbur Theater
I guess a lot has happened since I saw TV on the Radio a full 2 years ago (at literally almost the same date) just after the release of Cookie Mountain in Brooklyn. I remember the crowd being wild, the music being insane, and the hipsters being ironic. Although there was still a fair share of hipsters, the crowd was noticeably "less alternative", not to mention slightly older. Additionally, the venue was a lot stricter, so perhaps the absence of mysterious puffs of weed gave the show a more mature feel.
This show was at the Wilbur theater in boston. My enjoyment of the show was probably a little impaired by the fact that there were two different types of tickets available, balcony and floor, and that i was way up in the balcony seats in what was probably a really intimate show. it was also impaired because another friend who was going to see the show was literally touching the stage while giving me the finger and making a "look how close i am, suck my dick" motion. ah well.
Quite honestly the opener, The Dirtbombs, were one of the highlights of the show.
a lot of openers piss me off because they try and upstage the main band, and pretend that the crowd is there to see them. particularly awkward is when the opening band stops singing assuming the audience is going to fill in the lyrics, and then are met with an awkward silence. The Dirtbombs were thankfully conscious that they were the opener, but yet still maintained high enthusiasm and the crowd was really into them. Randomly during the show one of their two drummers put down his drumset into the crowd and just started playing there, which was funny and probbaly really cool for people standing there but sort of awkward in retrospect. I guess that's something you can only get away with when you're not that famous/ surrounded by hipsters who would never dare show enough enthusiasm to run their hands all over his body in a Jonas Brothers prepubescent fashion.
The first thing I noticed when TV on the Radio got on the stage was how different their overall appearence was. Their look was a lot more clean cut and almost preppy compared to Tunde Adebimpe's wild afro of 06. Perhaps it was because I was not really in the crowd of dancing people, but the tone of the show seemed much more subdued than prevoiusly.
To be honest, I was a little dissapointed with their set. I'm not too crazy about Dear Science and nearly all the songs they played were from that, which is understandable and predictable considering they're trying to promote their new album but still annoying. Additionally, their old songs they picked were somewhat odd choices, like "A Method" The crowd seemed to want more old songs as well. Even when the newest single "Golden Age" came on, the crowd was enthusiastic at first but the hype quickly died down as the song progressed. I found their rendition of "Staring at the Sun" to be particularly dissapointing, because they sort of adopted the whole "all you have heard this song 32987899873427923 times so therefore we don't need to play this well" mentality.
One highlight of the show was "Wolf Like Me." Everyone was dancing for it, including me, precariously leaning over the nosebleed balcony. Don't get me wrong, many of the songs were performed well, but few of them were powerfully dance-y enough to make me want to brave falling down into the assholes who managed to nab the General Admissions tickets. Another awesome thing about their show was the transitions between songs--a lot of the songs blended into eacho ther in rad ways.
Even though I have a lot of complaints, keep in mind my objections are partly because of my "I must whine" Jewish prerogative. It was all in all a sweet show, although not as good as it could have been, and not necessarily the most memorable concert of my life.
Type rest of the post here
Sunset Stallion
Little indie bands in the Midwest have a habit of making cheap thrift store sunglasses look good without Gucci purses and irony to go along with 'em, so in that spirit, OUTdependent decided to pick one of the many indie bands in the Chicago area on TheNextBigSound.com that shows promise. So we set about getting a little virtual face-time with the Sunset Stallion to see what they've been up to, and lo and behold
they answered us promptly and primly like a good band should. So without further ado, the co-ed voice of Champaign, Illinois, Chad, Marty, Hannah, and Otto.
Outdependent: So band, what've you guys been up to this summer?
Outdependent: Under your influences, you guys list a whole lot of very American-sounding American bands: Ben Folds, Wilco, Sufjan Stevens. But lets say that in a dystopian future-world where the United States is shunned culturally and musically, you were forced to pick a music favorite from off the continent. Who would you choose and for god sakes why?
Outdependent: How did you guys pick your instrumentation, with two vocalists and all of that?
Outdependent: Are you guys looking to stay together throughout the college years, and do this for a living?
Outdependent: If music were not an option, what would you each like to do as a dream profession?
Think they talk pretty? Listen to them SING.
These Are Powers, People's Center
Good thing my NY legs can handle walking, and my Brooklyn street-senses can handle sketchiness, because the People's Center is pretty far away from my neck of the woods.
Turns out I had no reason to worry, however. The People’s Center is a cute New England house, with a wood-floored first room and an out of tune piano, that is used for shows and events for the community. Bands set up shop and sell merchandise, and vendors sell vinyl. I was greeted by two smiling Manic Productions employees at the door. This is what I dreamed speakeasies would evolve into in the modern age; a modest communal space, without messy rivers of alcohol, for a new kind of 'prohibited' material- weird, new music.
But, uh, when are the people going to arrive?
I was the only concert-goer in the room for a little over an hour. After a few awkward moments sitting, reading and staring by my lonesome, the throng began to gather. The crowd ended up just as amiable as the folks from Manic Productions, but with much more facial hair. Beards are the new black these days.
I missed most of Open Star Clusters' set, but they did their fair share of moshing, screaming and noise-making.
The Massachusetts trio Neptune followed, with one of the most impressive instrument set-ups I’ve seen. Most of their equipment was handmade, including synths controlled by lightswitches, guitars made out of scraps of metal and gas-mask vocal processors. Here's a photo from Brooklyn Vegan from another show:
These are Powers did a 30 minute set featuring some "world premieres" of newer material. I've mentioned before that opening bands can reveal a lot about the main act, and this show was no exception. Though I've felt These are Powers' heavier influences, they've always been shadowed by the music world's new emphasis on the diverse new-primitivist scene. Live, These are Powers seemed to exemplify exploding hardcore and punk leanings in the context of other deep influences: 3 parts punk, 2 parts dance and 2 parts "new-primitivism". Maybe 1 part miscellaneous darkness and mystery for good measure. (A while ago I promised to define this genre, but today is not that day.)
Lead singer/howler/”ghost punker” Anna Barie is not your typical ball of energy- dry and sarcastic but deliberate and only slightly sporatic. She spent most of the show hovering over her cup of (who knows what), spitting occasionally. During her set, she’d go on tangents about random things as if everyone watching knew exactly what she was talking about. I was amused, but the band just ignored her. She cried, “You can sing along because you already know the words...because they can be anything you want...they could be the last VHS you watched…” Near the end of the show, she jumped on her mic stand as if mounting a horse, and rode through the audience.
Seems appropriate. "These" are precisely "her powers". Her powers lie in ghost-like ambiguity of words and general vocal obscurity, ghost-like amalgamation of genres past and present; and the darkness, freedom, and punch of art punk. (EMPHASIS ON THE 'PUNK'. BRING EARPLUGS.)
