4.16.2009, Flying Lotus/Brainfeeder NYC

Tufts Daily

Former New York Yankee pitcher David Wells wrote of pitching in Yankee Stadium, “I can’t begin to adequately tell you how thrilled I am just standing here on this little clay hill, knowing that I’m once again a small part of this incredible tradition.”

I will never be a professional baseball player, I hate the Yankees, and I’m at least 300 pounds lighter than David Wells, so I hesitate to say that I relate. Nonetheless, Boomer pretty much summed up how I felt walking into Manhattan’s Club Love for Brainfeeder NYC, a buffet of performances by some of the most imaginative electronic musicians in the world right now.

The bill—Pursuit Grooves, Mike Slott, Ras_G, Martyn, Kode 9, and Flying Lotus—reads both like a list of my favorite producers and a well-curated sampling of the sounds feeding into this nameless, decentralized movement taking place in electronic music right now. People around the world are experimenting with new sounds, cobbling together bits of dubstep, grime, hip hop, techno, psychedelia, tropicalia, and noise into self-referential music that doesn’t really sound like anything else.

I would have driven to a New Jersey Denny’s to see all of these musicians in one place, but hosting the show at Love, a room that boasts what many consider to be the best soundsystem in the US, is like soaking a James Cameron film in epic juice, then showing it to whole world by projecting it on the moon. This show was going to be a snapshot of contemporary international electronica, a Big Deal [please keep], and I was ready to watch history unfolded.

The de facto posterboy for this sound has to be Flying Lotus, who at 23 has already turned much of the existing musical landscape into his own unified, genreless vision. Regardless of whether you like the music, the most obvious quality upon hearing a Flying Lotus track—nearly any of them, but especially those from Los Angeles (2008)—is his skill.

It’s kind of like Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez: love him or hate him, there’s no denying how good he is. FlyLo can make sound palpable, blending different kinds of music together into satin-smooth, body-knocking sound that requires skill and nuance beyond most people’s capacity. You don’t have to like how it sounds to get this, but in case its not grotesquely obvious, I happen to very much like the way it sounds.

So, I’m standing at the epicenter of electronica, seeing the visionary human embodiment of modern music surrounded by other trailblazing musicians, all performing on an internationally renown soundsystem. Big Deal here I come!

Maybe it was my Everest-ian expectations, but his set was tame. Everything, except for maybe the two ill-advised housey tracks towards the end, sounded excellent, as FlyLo showed off the quickfire Trigger Finger-based mixing technique he has perfected and the many sounds of contemporary electronica he has helped pioneer. Nonetheless, it also all sounded dryly familiar. His mix prominently featured all kinds of older standards like “$tunt$,” “Shadows,” and his “A Milli,” and while his standards are all dope, it was a little disappointing to see what basically was a normal FlyLo set when the stars were fully aligned for a truly historic performance.

At one point, though, FlyLo grabbed the mic and said, “This is a track I made yesterday for y’all,” dropping into a gloomily textured but inescapably pounding beat smacking of equal parts J Dilla and Burial. To me, that’s the coolest kind of thing anyone is doing in music right now, and no one can quite as good as Flying Lotus. His set at Love did nothing to change my mind about that, but it does seem that I’ll have to go to Yankee Stadium to know what David Wells meant.

4.10.2009, Parts & Labor

Tufts Daily

Jay Leno is retiring in a little over a month, and when he writes his memoirs, I suspect he will write something along the lines of, “Michael Jackson’s fall from grace was the best thing that ever happened to me.” That whole circus, with its accessibility, crude physical humor, and generally broad appeal, is the kind of material that mainstream comedians pray for at least once a day, because its easy to joke about and everyone likes to laughat the rich. That’s why, for like two years, every Jay Leno joke went out of its way to reference moonwalking; not because it was funny, but because it was easy.

            To a live music writer, the takeover of Oxfam Café by Tufts Students Resources (TSR), who will turn the non-profit, charity café into a for-profit eatery, is akin to the Michael Jackson Saga for a mainstream comedian. This is a music columnist’s dream. The Man ruining a perfectly good art-space by turning it into a cash cow? Yes please! Greed wins again, isn’t anything sacred, (sob), just wait until I put this in my Live Journal, craft a smug Tweet, and talk about it with my friends at the faux-Marxist co-op where I live, etc.

            This line of thinking is simplistic, reductive, and flawed; more money will probably mean, among other things, more resources to invest in making a comfortable atmosphere and better audio production. I think it’s hard for anyone in the Tufts community to argue against that.

            Nonetheless, as I stood in the back of the café during Brooklyn band Parts & Labor’s ferociously incredible set, I couldn’t help but get swept in a wistful trip to cliché land. Would this kind of show or any of the dozens like it that I have been lucky enough to see in this dingy basement still be possible when the people running the café no longer give a rats ass about it?

            I’ve seen deafeningly loud, sardines-in-a-tin-can crowded shows by huge acts like Ratatat and Man Man, a sweaty rave with a bill that included Daedelus two days before he appeared on the cover of XLR8R Magazine, and hauntingly intimate performances by reclusive legend Phil Elverum from the Microphones. All of these nights are among my favorite memories at Tufts, and there is literally nowhere else on campus that could have hosted those shows and had them still be fun.

At Tufts, concerts either happen at Dewick—where there are as many TUPD officers as people in the audience, the music sounds like its coming from a set of iPod speakers, and the power-tripping Concert Board volunteers are too busy brownnosing the performer to pay attention to the crowd—or Hotung, where the band competes with the TV for attention.

Seeing and feeling Parts & Labor’s songs in an atmosphere rooted in community and social activism, I realized that, as much as I hate to admit it, the simplistic faux-Marxist tweeter may have a point. If, as I suspect, the TSR takeover will mean the head-spinning Tufts bureaucracy will exercise more control over Oxfam and the concerts they host, there might not be anywhere else on campus for performances as meaningful and powerful as P&L’s, Man Man’s, or Phil Elverum’s.

Don’t misunderstand me—I’ll gladly and repeatedly see Ghostface in Dewick. But for me, Oxfam filled a huge void in the Tufts community, giving interesting people within and outside of the community a place to see and hear quality live music. This year’s head of booking Kelly Duroncelet told me that she “likes to give people a chance to open up for people they normally would never have the opportunity to if it were any other place.” I hope—but doubt—that this is something TSR will eventually understand.

           

            

4.2.2009, Brian Jonestown Massacre

Tufts Daily

As far as I’m concerned, the best part about the Brian Jonestown Massacre is the chaos. Sure they’re a fine band and all—their music is cohesive, well-produced, mildly psychedelic but still approachable—but its not like they’re light years beyond their peers or anything. BJM are a good band and there’s definitely nothing wrong with them, but that’s about as laudatory as I’d get with their music.

            From a group-dynamic perspective, though, no one really does it like BJM, at least outside of Ricki Lake Show outtakes on the UPN network. To put it bluntly, these guys are volatile, in a terrifying, amusing, oddly gratifying kind of way. It really seems like they hate each other with the fiercest, most unbridled passion imaginable, and yet here they are, almost 15 years after the release of their first LP and still headlining shows at big venues in major markets.

            Although to be fair, this isn’t the same band as the one that released Methodrone all those years ago. Through his own general unpleasantness, singer, lead guitarist and all-around asshole extraordinaire Anton Newcombe has upset, threatened, or actively assaulted 22 former band members into leaving BJM, changing personnel quicker than General Motors.

This is a guy who got arrested for kicking one of his own fans in the head. He once tried to fight his whole band while onstage with them…all of them. In 1991, when a reporter tried to compare him to Eric Clapton, Newcombe wondered, aloud and to a member of the press, “What the fuck has Eric Clapton ever done except throw his baby off a fucking ledge and write a song about it?” This is not a nice man.

Nonetheless, it certainly makes seeing them more exciting. Is Anton Newcombe going to refer to me as “the posterboy for legalized abortion,” which he has said in the past about other musicians, or ruin his career by instigating a drunken punchup in front of the major label A&R’s who want to pay him to make music, which he also has done in the past? I don’t know, but the only reason I went to see his band last week was to find out what uniquely self-destructive antic he and BJM would enact before my very eyes.

I was, to say the least, disappointed that instead of threatening or belittling their fans with the aggression of someone with severe emotional problems, BJM professionally and amicably charged through nearly 25 songs from their good-not-great, totally inoffensive-but-not-that-inspiring catalog.

Songs like “Got My Eye On You,” “Nailing Honey to The Bee,” and “Oh Lord” show off the rockabilly/psychedelic/alt-rock/alt-country sounds that the band have done so unremarkably since the early 1990’s. It’s totally fine—with little variation, BJM make the kind of guitar-driven, risk-free music that white people have been making on a pretty regular basis for a few decades now, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Still, it isn’t worth my T-fare. Hearing outlandishly degrading heckles from a man who, at any moment, could throw a tambourine at me, his drummer, or his grandmother, would have been more than worth my time and money. Nobody antagonizes their associates or supporters quite like BJM, and nobody deserves a public collapse more than Anton Newcombe, and it would have made me very happy to see his train crash, even if it was into me. 

3.21.2009, the Boston Massacre v. the Charm City Roller Girls

Tufts Daily

There are two ways to look at the “live music” heard at the Boston Derby Games’ first bout of the 2009 season. One would be to write about the band that played at halftime—I forget their name, but it was something like I Hate My Dad: FEEL MY ANGST. The problem with this approach is that it’s a dead-end. IHMD:FMA’s show was the most painfully unlistenable thing in recent memory, and that’s pretty much the end of that thought. So, yeah, how ‘bout the weather?

            No, the second approach—writing about the fantastic playlist jumping out of the speakers at the Wilmington Shriners Auditorium—is much more promising, if only because it segues nicely into something I’ve been thinking about recently: if I were a major league baseball player, what ten seconds of music would play in my home stadium as I walked to the batter’s box?

            Every baseball fan thinks about this year-round, and for most of the year, we have slews of goofy answers. Last summer, I remember hearing rollicking, side-splitting responses of true comedic genius, like “Why Can’t We be Friends?” and the unintentionally hilarious “Something by Afroman, bro!” But before summer sets in, as April and Opening Day draw nearer, the committed fan approaches this question with a little more commitment.

The season is promising, and as the players approach the headspace necessary to run around in stifling temperatures for 6 interminable months, the fan needs get ready to help their team in the best way he or she knows how: to sit there and watch it—all of it—with the sad obsession of someone who loves watching other people play sports.

But sports obsession isn’t the point—the point is that people who are obsessed are impelled to have a legitimate answer to this question. Why is this seen as important? Why—aside from the fact that we are lame—do baseball fans spend springs pouring over this question? There are dozens of explanations, but for me, the biggest reason (and the link to the roller derby) is because music can help define sport.

This is a straightforward idea. Music is so pervasive in normal human experiences that we usually don’t even notice it any more—if you want to get sick, do a little reading on the ways that malls use ambient background music to trick you into buying things.

With sports, though, it’s different. It varies, but music usually serves not as a backdrop to the action but (at least part of) the action itself. When a batter heads to the plate, there is nothing else for fans to pay attention to except his 10-second audio snippet. While the dentist can just plug some smooth cheese into the speakers to distract you from your root canal, the baseball player has 10 seconds to distract people, get fired up, and in part define himself as an athlete. Better make it count.

One of the many achievements of the first Boston Derby Games was putting together a playlist that both reflected and expanded the sports unique aesthetic, Warped Tour rejects notwithstanding. While empowered women zoomed around a flat oval, slamming and lead-jamming each other into lovely pulps, playful, occasionally tongue-in-cheek, but aggressive selections like MC5’s “Kick out the Jams” and a blur of Black Sabbath songs blared in a endless, perfect complement to the action. Even better was when Boston DJ John Barera spun records—King Geedorah, Prince, A-Trak—that broadened the traditional roller derby sound, reminding people that partying and booze was part-and-parcel with the sport’s aesthetic.

One of my biggest regrets about graduating is that I am jut now getting into Boston Roller Derby. I could write pages on why—the empowerment, the spectacle, the sense of humor that runs through the sport—but really, I just like how the sport sounds.

3.07.2009, Sound Tribe Sector 9

When I first saw STS9, I was 16 and they were a thought-provoking, ludicrously skilled, highly energetic band with a small but committed following of warm, interesting people. Their music dipped and swelled, generating tension and then releasing it in a haze of live drum and bass, organic electronica, and rhythmically enveloping music that I don’t think anyone else has or can really match. Its pointless to try to describe what my first several shows meant to me, and I’ll probably never have the vocabulary or syntax to convey the ipmact that that music and community had and has had on my development. Just know that they were important.

            Thankfully, I’ve changed a lot since I was 16. I’m not saying I wasn’t the man in 10^th grade—I totally was, I’ve just gotten a lot of cool clothes since then that I can’t imagine living without now. Predictably, my life is a lot different now than it was then, and I’m confident that I am a deeper, generally better person than I was at my first STS9 show.

            I can’t say that about the band. Since I first saw them almost five and a half years ago, the quintet and their music have “evolved” from probingly intense organic electronica to a kind of futuristic, prog-arena electro-hip-hop with the emotional and spiritual depth of an Oprah rerun. For the last nine months, I’ve been falling in and out of favor with this new incantation of STS9, and the last of three shows in Oregon this weekend may have been the nail in my personal fandom coffin.

            While Thursday’s show in Eugene and Friday’s show in Portland generously blended together old, current, and brand-new sounds showcasing much of the band’s 10+-year career, Saturday’s Portland show was all about showing off the grandiose electronica sound STS9 began crafting with 2005’s ArtiFact and culminating in last summer’s Peaceblaster and this fall’s mini-tour of scaled down PA performances.

            In 2003, STS9 were playing songs inspired by Mayan mythology on stages decorated with crystals, channeling the collective effervescence of a passionate fanbase that followed them around the country. On Saturday, as has been the overwhelming rule for the last 18 months, they churned out bombastic electro banger after banger, doing everything possible to make Portland dance, emotions and spiritually be damned.

            And the mission was more than accomplished. Epic, melodically towering songs like “Be Nice” and uptempo, low-end-driven prog-techno songs like “Shock Doctrine” and “Lo Swaga” made people’s bodies do uproarious things all night long. It looked like my first show, where everyone in the audience seemed to subconsciously synchronize his/her body to the rhythms coming from the stage, anticipating peerless drummer Zach Velmer’s rhythmic shifts and downbeats and pulsing to bassist David Murphy’s warm tone. That kind of communion—between audience members, between the crowd and the band, and between the bandmates themselves—was what made seeing STS9 such an exuberant experience for me.

            That doesn’t really happen any more, for two reasons. The first, and I say this knowing how condescending this is going to sound, is the audience itself. I realize that STS9 crowds didn’t use to be cultural melting pots, but I haven’t been anywhere that has matched the positivity and unity of crowds at places like Mississippi Nights in 2004 or even the Higher Ground in 2006. And yes, there were a lot of white people with dreadlocks who really missed Phish, but there were also a lot of relatively clean cut hip-hop heads, bluegrass fans, and ravers who sought the energy that STS9 cultivated and shared.

            In Portland, and elsewhere for at least the last 18 months, the STS9 demographic has changed to replace a lot of the seekers—dreaded or not—with a bizarre breed of thugged-out quasi-hippie scenesters that put as much time into their wardrobe as they do to listening to STS9. A kid, wearing stunna shades, a Billionaire Boys Club trackjacket, and (get this) a Bob Marley flag as a kind of kafia, stumbled over to me with his identical friend and asked, “Yo homie, Are you thizzzzin’ tonight?” While I appreciated the Mac Dre reference, I did not appreciate the shallow, party-first attitude that this poser and people like him brought to the STS9 community. It was clear that I would not be talking to this boy about Mayan mythology.

But the bigger problem, I think, isn’t the crowd but the music. As the band’s tastes and music have shifted from atmospheric drum and bass and downtempo IDM to epic club bangers, their fanbase has largely shifted from those seeking to be illuminated and touched to those looking to rage really hard. There’s nothing wrong with this—I like to rage really hard, and with songs like “Heavy” and “The Unquestionable Supremacy of Nature,” STS9 proved that they can provide the musical accompaniment to that ambitious goal.

But I can rage anywhere. What saddens me about Saturday’s show and what will keep me away from STS9 for a while is that they no longer seem interested in pursuing the emotional and spiritual dynamism that I and so many others found in their performance. As they indicated during the weekend, it is still possible to get lost in the bright ebullience of “Circus” or to touch the ineffable in “Jebez,” but those achievements are rare. I used to think the only part of being 16 that I missed was the carefree humid summers of a kid with a car and no obligations. Saturday in Portland added “STS9 as I know it” to the short list. 

3.08.09, Joe Nice

Tufts Daily

One of the most amusing parts of next-level, forward-thinking electronic music is how eerily similar it seems to the most soulless and derivative sectors of social life. In some ways, cutting-edge music encourages and constitutes the new ideas that eventually blossom into new ways of living. In others, though, it would be difficult to distinguish the arrangements and mentalities of progressive electronic music culture from those “evolving” at a Hot Topic-sponsored lecture series featuring Kathy Griffin, Kevin Federline, and Vincent Gallo, with keynote address by Bono and a closing haiku by Ashton Kutcher,

            Take fame and status for example. The mainstream popular culture pantheon very often features people whose fame is absurdly inexplicable. Beyond annoying people who are in the public eye, I mean people who aren’t famous for doing anything valuable or even remarkable; they’re just famous. Somehow, through no amount of talent, charm, or contribution of any kind, people like Paris Hilton, Ryan Seacrest, and Simon Cowell matter to the American public. No one knows why, but the cultural chorus just echoes, “Here they are—household names. Remember these.”

             In some ways, electronic music that defies the generic, thoughtless, stale culture from which Ryan Seacrest derives his vapid powers (and swimming pool of gold dubloons) is fueled by the same arrangements that make Paris Hilton cool. How is it, for example, that Baltimore DJ Joe Nice has turned himself into the most important person in stateside dubstep?

He’s not a producer, he’s not a journalist, and he doesn’t have a label, and yet he is, bar-none, the most influential American in dubstep. For almost five years he has irrefutably been the US’s ultimate arbiter of England’s newest musical export. He has first dibs on the coolest, newest records in the world and a VIP pass to virtually any club with a good enough soundsystem to handle his decimating sub-bass sounds, and all he does is play other people’s music. Kind of similar to Paris Hilton, right? Seems weird, right?

Well, no.  For one thing, Joe Nice is the smoothest, classiest, nicest person on the planet, while Paris Hilton is a whoring dog. But more importantly, Joe Nice’s rise to fame is due in large part to an unbelievably refined ear, impeccable skills as a DJ, and a fierce passion for the music matched only by my contempt for Hugh Grant. The difference, essentially, between perplexingly relevant members of the popular culture canon and taste-making future-music kingpins like Joe Nice and British counterpart Mary Anne Hobbes is that while Paris Hilton can make a B-rate porno, Joe Nice can put on an explosive, rattling, indescribable show like the one in Portland this late Saturday night.

I think I could see Joe Nice spin records with the sound off. He has so much charisma onstage and he’s so meticulous about how he handles his records—how clean they are, how gently he returns them to his crate—that its almost inspiring to simply observe a musician that passionate about what he or she is doing.

That said, the music was jaw-dropping. Berbati’s Pan doesn’t have the best bass in the world, but it was adequate to deliver the synthy wonk of Joker’s “Digidesign” and the crushing, Rick Rubin-sampling wobble of Jakes’ “Rock Tha Bells” with sufficient force. Effortlessly mixing an array of distinct cuts from across the genre—many of them brand new and unreleased—Joe Nice showed off the skill, knowledge, and influence that make him a crucial figure in dubstep worldwide. On paper, it may not seem like he does much, but his set of skills prime him to shape and share some of the most exciting music in the world, a feat that, as far as I’m concerned, is more than worthy of celebrity status. 

2.28.2009, The Disco Biscuits

Tufts Daily

In the past I’ve voiced my ruthless contempt for Hugh Grant, who is the single-most annoying person in film not named Ben Stiller. However, I’ll have it known that close behind on my Hollywood hit list is John Cusack, who is every bit as sniveling and charmingly/pathetically puppy-like as his British counterpart but who nonetheless has one redeeming achievement: “High Fidelity.”

             In one of this opuses’ many nuggets of sage-like analysis, Cusack tells Laura—with eyes in full-on canine effect—that she can’t simultaneously like both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and that doing so would be such an egregious trespass that she might as well claim to support both the Palestinians and the Israelis. I realize it’s funnier when he says it, but that’s not the point.

The point is that I totally understand, because when I was 16, I fell in love with the band STS9 at a time when or in a culture where doing so meant that you almost categorically couldn’t like the Disco Biscuits.

Looking back, the dichotomy was absurd. I can understand siding with one side in some kind of tiff—Van Halen against David Lee Roth or Jay Farrar against Jeff Tweedy—out of personal loyalty to one party. But siding with one congenial band over another band that shares obvious aesthetic and cultural similarities seems not only stupid and pointless, but counterproductive.

Nonetheless, the beef was there, and the handful of times I’ve given the unfortunately nicknamed Bisco a chance to win me over, they’ve failed badly. I may have been slightly predisposed to dislike them, but their music always seemed too repetitive, too indulgent, and too shallow. They seemed to self-servingly mess around on their instruments for way too long, trying to get to a crescendo so it would seem like they were doing something impressive, and occasionally chanting the most god-awful lead vocals this side of Creed.

Maybe it was because I realized the absurdity of the Bisco/STS9 rift. Or maybe it was because STS9 has hit a creative dry spell over the last 12 months and I need something to fill the gap until they get their swagger back. Whatever the reason, I felt oddly impelled to see Bisco in Boston last weekend. Even more baffling than my desire to see this poorly named group of jamming, solo-happy, bad-singing Philadelphians, though, was how much I actually enjoyed it.

To be clear, I wasn’t blown away. But whereas my negativity towards the Disco Biscuits used to center around my philosophical aversion to their noodling, mindless melodies and unrelentingly untz-y rhythms, I left the House of Blues with a much less damning thought: maybe Bisco simply isn’t my kind of thing.

Drummer Allen Aucoin seems to have meshed with the band since I last saw them, and he has elevated his play beyond the endless house/techno untz that I had grown accustomed to. More importantly, though, what I once viewed as unabashed instrumental wankery felt a lot more legitimate and inspired, particularly in the second set.

During sections in songs like “Run Like Hell” and “Shelby Rose,” they didn’t wank as much jam in well-integrated, highly cooperative melodies. Their improvisations actually made sense, and I finally saw why so many of my friends think Jon Gutwillig is an elite guitarist. Dude can shred—no two ways about it. I may not like his style of playing but I can’t deny that he does some incredible things.

I will probably never like the Disco Biscuits—their music is too melodious, too peppy, too carefree in a patchouli-scented kind of way for my personal tastes—but after seeing and enjoying them free of whatever asinine fetters I have accrued over the years, I can at least say that I wish I had found this out earlier.

2.20.09, Dub War NYC: 2562 and Starkey

Tufts Daily

I like all kinds of electronic music, but I have simply never been able to enjoy techno, particularly minimal techno. Never. I know it’s probably a little uncouth or whatever, but I like raunchy, head-nodding, ruthless music, and techno always seemed too dainty for me. It’s the sonic equivalent of spiked, frosted tips with too much cologne and $150 jeans—highly stylized, very sophisticated, but kind of cheesy: the Scarlett Johanson of electronic music. I’m a Christina Ricci man, and my taste in electronica bears that out.

            I realize that there is a huge international market for this sort of music, and even a decently sized one in the US, but at this month’s installment of Dub War NYC, the legendary Manhattan dubstep monthly and arguably the most important recurring dubstep event in North America, it certainly looked like a lot of people share my preference for Ricci’s over ScarJo’s.

            Dutch DJ/producer 2562 very well may be the most talked about musician in contemporary dubstep circles, and with good reason. His blend of atmospheric, moody minimal techno with different elements of dubstep is a bona fide reinterpretation of both styles of music and, to me, one of the most interesting things happening in the genre.

            Depending on how you look at it, his music is either really dirty minimal techno or really clean dubstep. Some tracks add the easily recognizable dubstep wobble to an otherwise smooth, shiny, ScarJo minimal ambiance, while others subdue dubstep’s booming low-ends and dampen the third-beat snare hit, cramming the often grimey sounds of dubstep into a pair of tapered Sevens and waxing its eyebrows.

            All of this is great in my Sennheisers at home, but from my perspective, it looked like New York wasn’t really feeling it live. His primetime set at Dub War sounded wonderful on Club Love’s immaculate sound system, his track selection was strong, and his mixing clean and patient, but it just didn’t feel right. I kept waiting for something to happen—a big drop, a rewind, a change of tempo or mood, something—and it never came. One smooth, subdued track blended into another, and after a while, I just got bored, and from the looks of it, so did a lot of the crowd.

            People were enjoying themselves, nodding their heads approvingly and occasionally pumping their fists, but for all the well-deserved hype surrounding this great artist’s NYC debut on the country’s biggest dubstep stage, I think people were expecting more energy.

            Contrast 2562’s set with Starkey’s, one of the most prominent stateside dubstep DJ/producers, also making his Dub War debut. Aesthetically, the words “night and day” come to mind. While 2562’s style relies on sophisticated, subtle moods, Starkey—and I mean this as an exalted compliment—is more inclined to detonate subwoofers and make people get naked.

            Exploding out of speakers with the subtlety and delicacy of a head-on collision, Starkey’s music is fierce, dynamic, very much my kind of electronica, and a kind that I can’t imagine the Dub War faithful appreciating more than they did.  After two rewinds of standout track “Gutter Music,” which highlights his vulgarly discordant “street bass” sound, I saw people—myself included—moving in ways I did not know were possible, maniacally screaming and gesturing so approvingly that I felt kind of bad for 2562, who played some objectively awesome music. Christina Ricci would have approved.

            The distinction in crowd response raises an interesting question: are Americans programmed to reject the sounds of minimal dubstep? Was the response at Dub War an isolated event, or is there something about our electronic music culture that prefers big, loud, raucous music? As techno-leaning producers like 2562, Martyn, and Peverlist continue ascending the dubstep hierarchy, this may be an issue that stateside dubstep community grapples with in the future. 

2.21.2009, House of Blues Grand Opening ft. the Blues Brothers

Tufts Daily

Seeing as today is two days before the show that I’m writing about, I don’t think I have to tell you that I haven’t gone to this event, and I’m not going to—seeing a decrepit Dan Aykroyd try to resurrect his Blues Brothers schtick that wasn’t that cool in the first place isn’t something I want to do while I still have all my hair, a normal height/weight ratio, and am still welcome at the sperm bank.

            Nonetheless, though there are only a handful of (legal and physically painless) activities I’d want to be doing less on a Saturday night than seeing the Blues Brothers, this may very well be the most important event that I write about all year. This show marks the official grand opening of Boston’s very own House of Blues, the nationwide chain of concert hall/restaurants and the holders of the dubious trademarked motto “inspiration of music for the soul.”

            Aside from their horribly trite trademark, people take issue with a great deal of the HOB operating model. Owned and operated by the dreaded Live Nation—owners of more than 70 of the country’s best venues, several of the world’s highest grossing musicians, and currently in a battle with Congress to own the leading ticketing business in the US (Ticketmaster)—many rightly claim that HOB is part of a greedy, profit-hungry monopoly more interested in ripping people off than putting on good shows.

            With the Boston-area return of HOB, whose flagship complex opened in Harvard Square in 1992, many fans expect to pay asinine ticketing fees and high prices at the bar. My roommates are all gearing up to stand in big, anonymous, alienating crowds to see Bloc Party, The National, and Tom Jones (they’re hoping for some free panties, and I certainly can’t judge) in a faceless room, and I’m limbering up to wrestle the aggressive Cro-Magnon bouncers at the Disco Biscuits show later this month. These realities are almost as much a trademark of the HOB experience as the aforementioned motto, and in many ways it objectively sucks that if we want to see our favorite bands in our home city, we’re going to have to learn to negotiate these pitfalls.

            Nonetheless, as a Bostonian concertgoer, I am actually ecstatic that HOB is coming to Landsdowne Street. Being a monopoly means having a lot of money, but HOB and Live Nation overall have a pretty impressive national record of investing their staggering profits in the production end of their venues, something that I think the consumer greatly benefits from.

While high prices, big, awkward crowds, and ‘roid-raging security personnel are part-and-parcel of the HOB empire, so too are some of the best sightlines and soundsystems in the country.  HOB’s in places like Cleveland, Chicago, and New Orleans, consistently pull in rave reviews from people—like me—who hate supporting monopolies, like the community of small crowds, and look forward to appropriately priced drinks at concerts.

All of these things are important, and I wouldn’t be writing a live music column if I didn’t derive some pretty lofty metaphysical or phenomenological benefits from seeing shows in environments diametrically opposed to the corporate one that HOB epitomizes. Ultimately, though, beyond the ethical concerns I have with supporting Live Nation and the House of Blues, as a fan of music, I want to be able to clearly see the band and I want them to sound as good as they possibly can. I haven’t been to Boston HOB yet, but based on the Cleveland, Chicago, and NOLA incantations, I’m confident that our newest venue will be able to meet these needs in ways that cozy independent places like The Middle East can’t. As long as I don’t have to read their motto, color me excited

2.10.2009, The Gene Ween Band

Tufts Daily

“Hiatus” is one of my least favorite words in popular music vernacular. Either you’re quitting or you’re not—you shouldn’t need a thesaurus to describe your future ambitions, and you should spare your fans the frustration and invariable nerdery of scouring message boards for any informational nugget that may just possibly if the stars align and the circumstances are ideal hint at that hiatus’s end. I used to be really good friends with a few Phishheads before Phish went on hiatus in 2003…used to. I’ll leave it at that.

            So when Ween, probably my favorite band, decided to go on an indefinite hiatus at the end of last summer, I died a little inside. Not only did my ears ring in disbelief at hearing that stupid phrase pass through the lips of a band that I love dearly, and not only did I preemptively hate myself for wasting future hours of my life in online Ween forums full of people as pathetic and sad as myself, but I was just told that one of the most energetic and committed touring bands that I have had the pleasure of seeing was going to retire to their suburban homes for an indefinite period. I thought of my phormer phriends and shuddered.

            When I saw that the Gene Ween Band, a quartet of guitarist Scott Metzger, drummer Joe Russo, Ween bassist Dave Dreiwitz, and Ween founder/singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist Gene Ween, would hit the road while Ween drummer virtuoso Claude Coleman and guitar virtuso/Gene’s other half Dean Ween sat around taking drugs or whatever it is they do with their spare time, I was just happy that I could both pretend like I was at a Ween show and go somewhere that wasn’t near the internet. I expected to have some beers, chuckle a few times, and do a lot of yelling, but I definitely didn’t expect this fairly random assortment of musicians with little experience playing together to put together a highly entertaining or even particularly remarkable performance.

            Ever defiant, Gene Ween and friends dug deep into the songwriters’ prolific repertoire to produce a fantastic set of almost exclusively Gene Ween Band material. The band gelled nicely, generally stepping aside to allow Gener to showcase his demented-carnie-grandmother aesthetic with a batch of well written and really weird songs that brought to mind some of Ween’s peaks but also proved that Gener doesn’t need the whole band to be an icon.

            Songs like “Kansas City Star,” “Kite Flying Man,” and “Mountains and Buffalo,” all Gene Ween band songs, have the same sincere absurdity that makes Ween songs so smart and good, but replace Coleman’s dexterity and Dean Ween’s legendary skills with a greater emphasis on Gene’s gift as a vocal chameleon.

Whenever I’ve taken someone to their first Ween show, I’ve struggled to convince them that no, he isn’t singing through a filter, he can actually make himself sound like a murderous circus clown on benzos, or, in the case of standout song “Thanks and Praises,” where Russo did a fabulously accurate Claude Coleman impression, a Rastafarian zombie from the future.

            The highlight of the evening, and a microcosm of the whole Gene Ween Band sound, was “Let’s Get Divorced,” in which Gene’s tone matches Dreiwitz’s tuba accompaniment when he coarsely brays, “Let’s get divorced/see you in court/you’re stupid and unworthy of my love.” In melody and rhythm, the song evokes Ween A-lister “Poopship Destroyer,” and vocally, it smacks of the earnest, un-ironic wit that only Ween has mastered, but even in the absence of the parent band’s astounding instrumental skills, Gener proves nevertheless capable of making music that is no less excellent. It’s smart music, funny music, and ultimately music that does more than simply tide people over during stupid hiatuses. 

1.18.2009, Department of Eagles

Tufts Daily

Hugh Grant—who I hate—made a career out of playing the same person, each one as sniveling, perpetually flummoxed, and charming as the last. However, as he so accurately shows in “Gran Torino,” Clint Eastwood—who’s coolness has inspired me to name my first three children Clint, and East, and Wood, regardless of their genders—has made an even more successful career out of arguably even less variation. Harry Callahan, Edward Munny, and Walt Kowalski all have the same skills, the same flaws, and shamelessly kill similar amounts of people, and the only way to tell them apart is to measure the relative elasticity of the character’s skin—if flesh clings to his bones, then its Callahan; if it doesn’t, its Kowalski; if it kind of does, its Munny. And yet, if I could “Talented-Mr.-Ripley” anybody over the age of 65, it would no doubt be Eastwood.

Is my disparity in preference hypocritical? Should my hate for Hugh Grant and his one dimension apply to the equally limited Clint Eastwood? No, and here’s why: Clint Eastwood’s characters are REALLY COOL, and Hugh Grant’s characters are REALLY LAME. That all Eastwood characters are the same couldn’t mean less to me—as long as they drink heavily, have novelty-sized firearms, and talk like Satan, the more the merrier, I say.

            Enter Department of Eagles, technically a “side project” duo featuring Grizzly Bear songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Daniel Rossen but more accurately a smaller, leaner version of Grizzly Bear. While some musicians start side projects to explore musical interests that their primary group ignores, Rossen (and non-Bear Fred Nicolaus) uses DoE to explore vocal harmonies, guitar tones and phrases, and ambiance roughly identical to those he and his bandmates mastered on Grizzly Bear’s instant-classic 2006 release “Yellow House.” Do I hold my nose high, spitting on Rossen for his unwillingness to expand his horizons or challenge himself to do something new?

            Hell no. In fact, I shell out way too much money to see him do his thing live. DoE may sound a lot like Grizzly Bear, but Grizzly Bear’s music—especially Rossen’s contributions to it—is so intelligent, so arrestingly pretty, so like everything I want to hear from an indie rock band, that, in the absence of any new Grizzly Bear records, I will gladly take Rossen doing Grizzly Bear Lite (editors: please keep this), which is essentially what the DoE show at the Brattle Theater was.

            “Around the Bay,” built around delicate guitar fingerpicks and Rossen’s cherubim soprano, for example, sounded like a less haunting version of “Yellow House” standout “Little Brother,” only without the orchestra of backing instruments. You didn’t have to squint to see the similarities in mood and instrumentation between the intro of “House” song “On a Neck, on a Spit” and whimsical DoE tune “Floating on the Lehigh,” which feels and sounds like a pared down version of the Grizzly Bear song. And “Balmy Night,” the last song on DoE’s 2007 release “In Ear Park,” essentially digests “Little Brother,” “Easier,” and “Reprise” into thinner, less moving version of “Yellow House,” which, to me, is both logical and laudable for someone who played a central role in arranging that record.

Not only should we expect the same musical vision with which Rossen imbues “Yellow House” to figure into his non-Bear songwriting, but for him to be able to even come close to replicating the uniquely ephemeral atmosphere of that record is a genuine achievement.

            The only disappointment was how unfunny Nicolaus and Rossen were. I expected hilarious banter from the guys who named an EP “Noam Chomsky Spring Break,” but their painfully awkward exchanges left me unsatisfied. But while their comedic prowess didn’t live up to my predictions, their music did, in a great way. Yes, DoE sounds a lot like Grizzly Bear, but as far as I’m concerned, sounding like a band that A) you’re in and B) is awesome is far from an assailable creative choice. 

11.18.2008, M83

Tufts Daily

Some bands, like The Egg, who I wrote about last month, succeed despite their boring, off-putting, or generally lame names. Their music transcends the band’s failure at this most basic of marketing/branding ploys, enabling the listener to see that, behind this failure lies a band that is worth supporting, dumb name notwithstanding.

            The problem with M83 is that their name is so cool that it threatens to overshadow their music. Visually, I think those characters fit well in that arrangement—the “M” and the “3” kind of tease your brain into thinking the name is symmetrical. You have to wonder what “M83” means, but not in the confounding way that you have to wonder about a name like “Death Cab for Cutie.”

I don’t care what Death Cab for Cutie means because that’s a stupid name, nonsensical name; M83, on the other hand, is both intriguing and stylish, and I actually would like to know what it refers to. Is it some kind of erudite, boho French thing that my Midwestern psyche could never understand? Is it actually related to fireworks like it is my head? I don’t know!

            I’ve also had this longstanding concern that my fandom for M83, whose entire catalog I own and to whom I have committed many listening hours, derives more from loving their name than loving their music. I probably put more stock in band names than most people, and if that’s you, then maybe you won’t understand this, but for me, having an smart, visually appealing name can overshadow average music. This has certainly been the case for me with !!!, Deerhunter, and Junior Boys. I like these musicians fine, but I like the bands more than their music because of their sweet names. Has this been the case with M83 as well? Am I lying to myself?

            After seeing them perform, the answer is emphatically, in all caps and boldfaced, blood-red font, NO. M83 put on an absolutely phenomenal show, adding to and reworking old material and transforming their endearingly cheesy songs into a coherent, moving musical experience.

            You have to love a show in which the band plays every song you wanted to hear. By that rubric, M83 gets an A++: except for omitting the song “Asterick,” Anthony Gonzalez and friends performed the set list I would have written. Performing old and brand new songs with equal panache, M83 really drew attention to how consistently good they have been over their seven-year career.

            That said, the show’s standouts were all recorded in the last three years. Whatever the dictionary says is wrong: with its sweeping vocal chorus and echoing drums “Moon Child” is the definition of epic. The atmospheric, electro-tinged “We Own the Sky” was both delicate and banging, alternately inciting supplicant arm raising and rager-bro fist-pumping. And though a handful of the subtle shifts and layers of “Teen Angst,” to my mind still their best song, got lost underneath the incredibly loud musical ether they create, that song still managed to tug heavily on the heart strings.

How they made these cheesy, melodramatic songs moving at all, much less beautiful was probably M83’s biggest achievement. The no-one-asked-me-to-the-prom, “Sixteen Candles” motif of “Kim and Jessie” and “Graveyard Girl,” while goofy and ironic on record, are actually quite moving live. I’m a little embarrassed to say that I found songs with lyrics like “Death is her boyfriend/she spits on summers and smiles to the night/I can’t help my love for graveyard girl” genuinely pathological, but given how good M83 played, more than good enough to live up to the promise of their sweet name, I’m just a little embarrassed.

            

11.9.2008, The Hold Steady

Tufts Daily

There are a lot of things people do at shows that make me want to gargle with Drano, but near the top of the list is when some “jaded vet” seeks you out to say, “Yeah man, I remember when (the band) used to play in VFW halls/basements/some other hellhole venue.” OMG…really? You were THERE?!?! You are sooooo cool!

I’m not quite ready to admit that I’ve become one of those people, but I will say that seeing the Hold Steady headline a show at one of Boston’s biggest venues made me a little wistful. In an admittedly creepy way, it kind of felt the way I imagine my mom feels when I do something adult-like.

The first time I saw the Hold Steady was when they played the AppleJam side stage at Spring Fling my freshman year. The crowd for their first set (me, my friend Dan) was so sparse that they just played the same songs again later in the day when more people arrived. They forgot their drum mat, so they borrowed my red shag rug, and when the show ended, they personally lugged all their gear (including my rug) to their self-pimped ride, which was a cargo truck that they had modified with a couch and a TV that plugged into the cigarette lighter.

Their entire operation seemed so endearingly amateur. While other bands were out trying to prove to critics and themselves that they belonged in the music business, here was a group of dudes—all friends—who drove around in a crappy truck, boozing, stealing shag rugs, and threatening to supplant Wilco as the best American rock band of the decade. They weren’t “visionary musicians who lived in Williamsburg,” they were just an incredible rock band from Minnesota.

Yes their music was brilliant, and yes their shows had more energy than a coked up Jack Russell terrier, but maybe my favorite part of the Hold Steady’s aesthetic was this element of amateurishness. I found it refreshing to be around musicians this laid back and unpretentious, so apparently clueless about what they had gotten into, and so nonchalant about it.

Their music fed into this image. Scan the pantheon of successful indie rock acts, and you won’t find many other bands—either when the band formed in 2000 or today—that proudly wear Americana rock icons like Bob Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and The Replacements as influences, but there’s the Hold Steady, as proud to be Americans as they are kleptomaniacal.

While bands like Animal Collective were looking for ways to make their music hipper, weirder, and less approachable, The Hold Steady were cramming together hooky guitar leads, packaging them with Finn’s guilty, drug-and-beer addled takes on the American youth experience, and pouring Budweiser and Makers Mark over everything.

Indie rock looked to be headed into obscure realms of pretense and obliqueness, and I thought (approvingly) that the Hold Steady might be a little naïve to insist so emphatically on telling guitar-driven, red-white-and-blue stories explicitly about people’s lives. It was like no one told them that you had to love either Sonic Youth or Joy Division to make it in indie music, More importantly, it seemed like, if you told them, The Hold Steady wouldn’t care.

 I know it’s lame, but when I saw their gigantic tour bus idling outside the Orpheum this weekend, I kind of felt like my boys had grown up. The amateurs that I knew and worshipped, the bro’s that graciously hung out with me and my annoying freshman buddies in 2006, the drunks that stole my rug, were officially Rock Stars.

Finn no longer needs that goofy yellow foam microphone cover to prevent his sandpapery voice from feeding back—they have nice mics that do that. Tad Kubler now needs a rack to accommodate his large arsenal of guitars. They drink less on stage, and the crowd is too far away to get showered with beer. They inexplicably have a gong. This isn’t a group of potentially out-of-place Minnesotan’s playing bar rock—this is a famous band, and they have really made it.

And yet, thankfully, The Hold Steady still somehow seem drunk and out-of-place. They are officially accomplished, respected musicians, but their songs—older tunes like “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” newish ones like “Chips Ahoy,” and brand new ones like “Constructive Summer”—still leap off the stage like brash, bar-poetic treatises on being young and American. Finn’s voice still scathes as passionately and eloquently as it did at Spring Fling, and I still get goosebumps when, during “Stevie Nix,” he laments, “Lord to be 17 forever…”

And though—or because—Kubler chooses every song which guitar to use, he plays them all like Thin Lizzy is in the audience. Mischievous and triumphant, both older songs like “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” and “Southtown Girls” and new songs like “Sequestered in Memphis” unabashedly pine for the good ole days, when guitarists soloed loudly in between power chords and were proud of it. I bet Kubler somehow tricked his label into buying him the ridiculous double-necked guitar he only played once.

Fittingly, they closed the show with “Killer Parties,” the last song from their 2004 debut. No other song encapsulates The Hold Steady’s endearingly brash, potentially naïve aesthetic as this song, and I like to think that it wasn’t a coincidence that this was their encore. When Finn growled “We were young and we were in love and we just needed space/and we heard about this place called the United States,” it was as though he was telling me, “Don’t worry Mikey, you’re rug’s in the bus.” 

10.31.08, Lipp Service

Tufts Daily

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from The Travelling Wilbury’s (there is only one thing), it is that supergroups tend to be less than the sum of their parts. It seems like a good idea: George Harrison is good, Roy Orbison is good, Bob Dylan is good, Tom Petty is pretty good, and Jeff Lynne won a Grammy. If they all get together, they’ll be good and win a Grammy. QED.

Granted that same logic produced Cream and Blind Faith, but it also produced Audioslave, Zwan, and the 2004 US men’s national basketball team, aka the Cream Team. Having a slew of talented people doesn’t guarantee a quality output. If you get that many elite cooks in the kitchen, issues of chemistry, focus, and balance can get in the way of success, and the resultant supergroup sometimes just gets its ass kicked by Puerto Rico and Lithuania.

            Lipp Service—the live electro supergroup of producer Eliot Lipp and Lane Shaw and Alex Botwin from the Boulder band Pnuma Trio—formed when a promoter asked Lipp, whose solo performances consist of him, a computer, and some synthesizers, if he could perform his buttery smooth, head-nodding, rump-rousing electro/hip hop/IDM blend with a live band.

            The live music gods then intervened, serendipitously introducing Lipp to Botwin, and Shaw at a festival in February. The trio kicked around the Lipp Service idea, settled on it, and rehearsed a few times. The rest, as they say, is history.

            Playing to a haggard crowd of zombies, ghosts, and slutty Joe the Plumbers, Lipp Service showed Austin, Texas how a supergroup can be at least, and at times, way more, than the sum of its parts. With chemistry like peas and carrots and bass that shook windows, Lipp Service put on a Halloween performance that was scarily (SNAP!) good.

             That these lads only recently met and have played less than ten shows together is absolutely astounding. On stage, the trio—Botwin on bass, Shaw on drums, and Lipp playing keys and stripped down samples from his songs—have such a visibly harmonious dynamic, you kind of expect them to finish each other’s sentences back stage.

During “Eyesore,” you could see Lipp look up from his keys/computer to nod/motion at Shaw to cue the next drum section. During Lipp’s solo sets, cuing synthetic drum tracks would be something that he would do himself from his computer. During the Lipp Service set, the transitions were so smooth that Lipp might as well have been doing them digitally, with the added benefit of being between live drum tracks instead of programmed ones.

The live drums add an element to Lipp’s songs, but at times, Botwin’s live bass makes the Lipp Service songs better than their digitally produced counterparts. Not only does Botwin handle Lipp’s synth lines with his four-string, but on tracks like the swaggering banger “Vallejo,” he turns them up, breathing even more life into my favorite songs.

The best was “Flashlight.” I was outside the venue for the first few bars of this Lipp mainstay, and across the building, down two flights of stairs from the stage, the windows were vibrating from the bass. And it wasn’t just the volume—Botwin more than holding down the bass lets Lipp focus on tweaking, cutting, and cuing the melodies in ways he simply can’t when he’s responsible for the whole song.

Lipp Service is what happens when talented, egoless people cooperate. Playing off each other’s strengths, the supergroup sounded infinitely better than they would have if they each showcased their individual skills, and that’s how they put on a killer show. If they could only play basketball… 

10.28.2008, Leo Kottke

Tufts Daily

Someone once told me that seeing Tom Waits in concert is like meeting God but not having to pay for the DMT. I’ve seen Tom Waits twice, and I’m going to tell you that if this sage-like analysis is true, then seeing Leo Kottke is like discovering the Holy Grail in Atlantis surrounded by intelligent extraterrestrial life who are boys with Amelia Earhardt, and getting free DMT while you’re there.

I tend to get really worked up about performances by young-gun electronica producers and high-energy bands with standout rhythm sections. 63-year old Oklahoma-raised Leo Kottke is neither of these things, but his was still the best show I’ve seen all year. Musically jaw dropping and emotionally sublime, the guitarist reminded me (as if I could forget) why he will die one of the most significant figures both in American music history and my life.

Enough has been said by more knowledgeable people about Kottke’s guitar abilities that I really have no place talking about it again, but whatever it’s my column, I do what I want. I know and have seen a lot of guitar players and even played for a spell myself, so it’s hard for me to really wrap my head around how much better he is than virtually almost everyone else I have ever heard.

Simply watching his hands and seeing these painfully intricate phrases take form in front of my eyes, I felt much the same as I did seeing Lebron James beat the Detroit Pistons in game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference finals: either I’m watching some kind of elaborate hoax, or this is a display of skill and creativity more incredible than any I’ve ever seen.

With the 12-stringed “Gewerbegebiet,” it was the composition. Part black dirge, part multi-colored flamenco, the song waltzes then explodes in two totally different but somehow similar sections. With “Ants,” which he prefaced with a rambling, hilarious review of his favorite illustrated ant biology textbook, it was the left hand, frantically running along the fret board and precisely pressing on the disparate notes with spidery dexterity. Other times, it was his open or unorthodoxly dropped tunings, his battered baritone voice, or his commanding presence on stage. Whatever it was, every single second of the show coursed with an elite level of technical prowess that I’m neither the first nor the last to geek over.

Kottke’s skills aside, on an autobiographical level, I haven’t been as moved at a show as I was at the Sanders Theatre. Not only is he the endearing grandfather figure that I always wanted, but he’s also a powerfully pathological force for me. When I was 12, my parents took me to see Kottke at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis. Ever since, his music—particularly his voice—has evoked not only that night, but my parents, my city, and my adolescence as well. Seeing and hearing him in that beautifully intimate room brought all of that rushing back in a swell of nostalgia, and for a Midwestern boy who has never been that comfortable in New England, that’s a pretty powerful and important effect.

But even if you don’t share my personal attachment to the man, Kottke gave his legion of fans many, many other things to smile about on their way home. Personally, I left both knowing beyond a doubt that I just sat second row center away from one of folk music’s ageless legends, and having taken a poignant trip through the more treasured areas of my pathos. And I wasn’t even tripping! 

10.21.2008, The Egg

When I saw “The Egg” next to stellar acts like The New Deal and !!! on the Camp Bisco VII bill last summer, I assumed that festival organizers/namesakes the Disco Biscuits were trying to save a little money by filling out the excellent schedule with crappily named bands from their local Philadelphia.

Not the case. It wasn’t quite the British Invasion, but it was apparently a gigantic deal when the Biscuits managed to snag similarly techno-jammy London band The Egg for their annual summer festival. The Internet festered as the notoriously passionate Biscuits’ nation collectively soiled themselves when it was announced that these longtime runners of the UK live-band electronica game were coming to the US.

            Luckily, I was not one of these incontinent folks as, like most of the nation, I had never heard of this stupidly-named band. But trusting the Biscuits tastes, I decided to use the magic of the Internet to track down some of their recordings and see what all the fuss was about.

            Not much. Though they have some stellar moments, on record, The Egg are pretty average—they kind of sound like the Disco Biscuits if the Disco Biscuits didn’t like to party, or conversely, Air if the Frenchmen partied like hedonists. So when I saw that they were coming to town, I didn’t exactly have to reach for my Depends. But, being a certified painter, I figured some show is better than no show, so I went back for round two.

            NOW I know what all those Biscuits kids were geeking about on the Internet last summer—The Egg is awesome live. Funkily electronic but not passé, house-y but not cheesy, The Egg combine professional cohesiveness with Ben Cullun’s filthy bass playing, catering to a rowdy dance party and doing the Disco Biscuits proud.

            None of this is to say that they didn’t indicate why their records are underwhelming. Except for Cullun, no one in The Egg is that good. The keyboards are repetitive, largely un-improvised, and technically un-wowing. The drumming is all of these things but more so, with Maff (lol) Scott ceaselessly banging out the same rhythms song in and song out: like the Energizer bunny, only with much worse teeth.

            That said, The Egg perform with the savvy and cohesiveness of a band with nearly 15 years of touring experience. Effortlessly segueing between songs and visibly communicating transitions to each other on stage, The Egg may not have displayed impressive chops, but they definitely maximized their abilities. The criminally small but obviously appreciative “crowd” seemed to appreciate the limited lag time between songs—I haven’t seen the Middle East’s wooden floor so covered in sweat since that nightmare I had a few years ago whereby the club was turned into a sauna and sat around sweating with Chris Matthews and Pat Robertson.

            As impressed as I was with their professionalism, I was equally impressed with their bassist. Ben Cullun can play—anything from groovy funk rhythms to propulsive house to relaxed noodling, he got the “crowd”’s collective booty shakin’ almost right away and never really stopped. While the drums were mindlessly interminable, Cullun’s sustained bass rhythms shifted rationally, creatively, and dynamically, and at points, threatened to steal the show from the whole band.

            More often though, The Egg’s whole was substantially greater than the sum of its parts.  The Egg aren’t amazing, but they’re professional, smooth, and polished (obviously—they’re from the same country as James Bond), they have a killer bassist, and they throw down live. If they ever come back to Amurrica, I may be needing needing those diapers after all. 

10.11.2008, Les Savy Fav

Tufts Daily

I generally consider it a bad thing for a musician’s performance to sound like their records. Why would I leave the house to see and hear something I already paid for when I bought the record, especially when there are so many witty pictures on the Internet that I could be looking at instead? I’ll tell you why: I wouldn’t.

            I like my concerts like I like my medical procedures: experimental. I want to see a band explore their material, fleshing out the synchronicities that lie hidden in the mix and adding dimensions to the songs that I like on record. I want obscure covers. I want improvisation. I want something more than what I already paid for (or illegally downloaded).

            Les Savy Fav’s show at the Middle East made me reevaluate these priorities. Though the Brooklyn band devoted their hour-long set to precise renditions of their reams of recorded material, I left knowing that I had seen both an elite live performance and a potentially legendary live band.

            One of the reasons LSF can crush a live show while carbon-copying their material is because their material is so good. I don’t like their second album, but the rest of their four LP’s play like greatest hits compilations. When my town-painting companion leaned over to me midway through their set and informed me that LSF were only playing their “bangers” for the spoiled Boston crowd, I agreed before I realized that their entire catalog is made up of “bangers.”

            Then again, I don’t think I’d say that the peculiarly abrasive LSF write “bangers.” At times, like during the dynamic “The Sweat Descends,” Harrison Haynes’ sharp rhythms brought to mind dancier bands like LCD Soundsystem, and watching Boston’s hyper-hip wile out during this tune and other high-tempo numbers was definitely a highlight of the show (for the lulz). More often than “bang,” though, LSF’s songs alternately stab and stomp in ways that, frankly, few other bands’ music does.

            Most of this stabbing-stomp mechanism comes from the mesmerizing guitar of Seth Jabour. With a crisp, saber-sharp tone completely of his own, he’s one of the few guitarists that I know of who so clearly stands out despite almost never soloing. “Rome (Written Upside Down),” where Jabour cleanly breezes between precisely synchopated licks, displayed Jabour’s penchant for subtly, ever-so-slightly dominating a song.

            Alternately, during songs like “The Equestrian” and “Tragic Monsters,” Jabour played rhythm guitar in his singular tone until the bridge, where he went off on finger-spraining fret board maneuvers that were somehow catchy. In addition to being a rousing live guitar player, I’d also rank him near the top of my underrated guitarist list.

            I think one of the reasons he goes relatively unnoticed—and the other reason LSF can kick ass live just by playing their songs well—is because he’s in a band with Tim Harrington. “Charismatic frontman” does not begin to describe LSF’s lead singer/jester, the wittiest (and bawdiest) between-song banterer around. Not only does his costume-changing, crowd-infiltrating energy wear off on the audience, but he has an absolutely incredible voice.

Part animal howl, part screed, he can make anything sound infuriating, or by channeling his female doppelganger on songs like “Patty Lee,” maniacally sexual. His energy, primal, creative, and genuine, is unlike anything else on stage anywhere.

Harrington’s anima is what sets LSF apart as an elite live band. Nonetheless, it is crucial to remember that behind the bald, bearded man wearing a wedding dress and sweating profusely is an incredible band playing incredible songs—songs that I’d gladly pay to see and hear over and over again.

10.06.2008, Hudson Mohawke/Rustie

Tufts Daily

Right up there with democracy, fallen heroes, and Oprah, America loves talented young people. I actually remember an episode of Oprah dedicated to kids who had memorized pi to over a hundred digits or something like that.

Sports Illustrated featured highs-chooler LeBron James on a magazine cover claiming the teenager could be a top NBA draft pick before his 18^th birthday. At the tender age of 15, Miley Cyrus is diving headfirst into swimming pools of gold dubloons and blowing her nose in magazines of which she is on the cover.

            America may love young talents, but I don’t. Real talk: little makes me feel more incompetent than a teenage megastar. While these youngsters are out being inappropriately good at stuff, I’m scrubbing around college trying to get hired doing anything after I graduate. I’m majoring in AMERICAN STUDIES. Christ, I’d be lucky to get a job waiting tables without a recession, and this little Cyrus child is one of the world’s 100 most influential people?

            Enter Hudson Mohawke and Rustie, two of today’s most exciting new producers and, judging solely on their appearance, not at all old enough to buy alcohol in the US. There are few things for which I’ll set aside my beef with filthily talented and successful youngsters, but the bumping, brilliant sets that these Scottish lads turned in over the weekend is towards the top.

            I’ve heard that HudMo is 19, but other than that, little biographical information exists about he and fellow Glasgow native Rustie, other than that, according to his website, Rustie is “older than he looks.” This description doesn’t help much: this guy could be 15 and still be older than he looks. Baby-faced and scrawny, he kind of reminds me of an adolescent David Spade. HudMo’s not much different. Bigger, but he too sports the babiest of faces, except for a dirt stache not unlike the one that I had at my Bar mitzvah.

            But though HudMo and Rustie look young, they make music better than people who have been at it twice as long. While HudMo’s beats may be slightly more accessible than that of his Warp Records labelmate, their music shares a tone. Part electro, part hip hop, part dub(step), but most notably experimental, these two take similar approaches to the off-kilter, Dilla-influenced production that tastemakers around the world love.

            And who can blame them? HudMo and Rustie leveled Montreal’s Coda last weekend with a monstrous back-to-back DJ set showcasing both the keen ears and depth of rhythmic influences that make their music so cool.

            The mixing, disjointed and jerky, mirrored their production styles and the dirty-beat aesthetic of producers like golden boy Flying Lotus. The song choice, however, was wholly unique. From unreleased Machinedrum tracks to “Regulators” by Warren G, Rustie and HudMo cycled through all types of hip hop, electro, and jazzy, dirty beats, both showing off what they listen to and putting together a ridiculous party.

The two jammed together T-Pain remixes, jazzy-smooth numbers from HudMo’s Heralds of Change project, and a grip of the filthiest, evilest dubstep breaks around, intermittently peppering in everything in between and somehow gelling everything into a rough, messy masterpiece

I still don’t know how they turned all of that music into a unified piece of music. With all different kinds of genres and tempos swirling around in the mix, it would be too easy to get lost in the madness, and how HudMo and Rustie both controlled it and turned it into a banger is beyond me. But then again, that’s why I’ll be obsessively following their careers from the unemployment line for the next decade.

9.05.2008, Flying Lotus

When I was a freshman, I incurred the wrath of internet-scouring Phish fans who took issue with a handful of lines in a piece I wrote for the Observer about my New Year’s Eve with Santa Cruz band STS9. Leaving out all of the horribly offensive things I said about Phish, their entire fanbase, and everyone who owns or has owned Birkenstocks, the gist of said article was that I thought it was inappropriate for STS9 to be lumped in with so-called jam-bands just because they play long songs. If electronica-leaning STS9 has anything in common with Phish, it’s that they are excellent live performers and throw down particularly hard on occasions like New Year’s. That’s (roughly, omitting some things) all I said. And I got heckled with some threats dastardly enough to get Dick Cheney excited—by people with email addresses like bowlmaster420, phishbr4h420, and 420420420 no less.

             Nearly three years later, I still agree with that sentiment, bong-waterboarding threats be damned: the only serious similarity between STS9 and Phish is that, given a properly large occasion, both bands are/were able to host truly elite celebrations. I solidified this belief two weekends ago when I made another pilgrimage to Colorado to see STS9 level the beautiful Red Rocks Amphitheater. STS9 did not disappoint, but while I’d love to repeatedly talk about STS9’s ingenuity, spiritually transcendent melodies, and generally superior live performance, I think there are more interesting things to say about the weekend’s two sets from quasi-hip-hop production golden boy Flying Lotus. Also, I’m confident I can talk about him without offending that many people.

            It’s been a gigantic year for Flying Lotus, he of the spaced out, deliberately sloppy beat. In 2006, the now 24-year old debuted to a largely unwelcoming critical reception, getting written off by many as a Madlib-J Dilla biter. Hilariously, much of the praise for 2008’s “Los Angeles,” is for so tactfully displaying his Madlib-J Dilla influences, which are hard to miss. His beats tend to be ever-so-slightly off-time, and he arranges his them into a foggy, textured expanse. His music feels and sounds organic the same way that Madlib and J Dilla’s does, a statement that, in hip-hop, is like telling a baseball player that he plays like Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez.

            Still, despite (or maybe even because of) the many aesthetic similarities between FlyLo and hip-hop production’s upper pantheon, he’s not REALLY a hip-hop producer. The spacey fuzziness of his music that so strongly evokes Dilla also sounds a lot like dubstep, especially when he completely drops out of the low-end (more on that in a minute). Minimal at times and definitely “experimental” sounding, FlyLo calls to mind left-field dubstep producer Kode9 at least as much as he does Madlib.

            Exactly where he fits in the STS9 aesthetic, then, is unclear, but Boulder-based Euphonic Conceptions (run by two STS9 loyalists) booked him to headline their after-party following STS9’s fan-club only show at the Boulder Theater. I love Flying Lotus and drooled at the opportunity to see him live, but this seemed a little questionable even to me. First of all, while FlyLo may be blowing up, he’s still very much a niche musician: massively popular within certain circles, but generally anonymous everywhere else. As a longtime member of the STS9 sphere, I certainly wouldn’t have counted their faithful as a group particularly down with FlyLo. Moreover, having been to a slew of STS9 after parties, I can attest that uptempo, dance-ready music tends to win the post-STS9 crowd over—not (literally) offbeat, atmospheric, quasi-hip-hop.

            Note to self: never doubt Euphonic Conceptions. They had the brass to stake their reputations on an unlikely headliner who went ahead and absolutely blew the doors off the Fox Theater, not to mention a bunch of tired peoples’ minds. Expertly pairing tracks from “Los Angeles” and his new limited-release “Shhhh!” EP with a mindblowing array of dubstep, IDM, and hip-hop tracks and cranking the low-end up to 11, FlyLo put on a DJ set for the ages.

            Tracks like “Shhh” and “Golden Diva” define the fuzzy naturalness that makes his music so good but that—I thought—would make it less than ideal in a late-night setting. So wrong. By accenting the bassy low ends—I mean, REALLY accenting; gramps in the back could feel his fillings vibrate—FlyLo turned these songs from blunted head-nodders into body-flinging bangers. Same with the explosive Daedelus single, “Hrs:Mins:Secs:,” which, given the FlyLo low-end treatment, sounds like a fax machine bringing about Armageddon. The mercurial “Archangel” by downtempo dubstep artist Burial grew wings under Flying Lotus’ skilled hands, and already-bangers by Caspa and Rustie rumbled and wobbled the Fox like a skinny jackhammer-er. Whatever relative obscurity he may have had with that crowd disappeared when he did, to ferocious applause and a deafening chorus of “FLYLO WHAT?!”

            What does this have to do with STS9? This is yet ANOTHER example of the band and their community’s penchant for ratcheting up the festivities on special occasions. How do you improve on seeing one of the country’s premier live bands in perhaps the best outdoor venue in the country? Bring out one of the hottest, most original musicians in the world, give him some new subs, and tell him to go nuts. Need more proof? Just ask FlyLo. His parting words to the Fox Theater: “Dayum y’all, this shit was FUN.” Well said. 

Art Brut, “It’s a Bit Complicated.”

So...this isn't about live music, but I wrote it anyway. It ran in Playbackstl. Linkage!

B+/A-: RIYL The Hold Steady, Franz Ferdinand, Andrew WK

In many ways, listening to Art Brut’s fantastic 2005 debut “Band Bang Rock + Roll” is a lot like listening to the last two Ween albums: either you get it or you don’t, but you don’t really have to get it to like it.  Sure, Eddie Argos’ plain-spoken critiques and incredibly-close-to-home parodies of himself, hipsterdom, and the rock’n roll lifestyle were spot-on hilarious, but they don’t have to strike any chords (or make sense, really) for the album’s infectiously rollicking guitar melodies to register. It’s kind of like watching Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth:” obviously, it’s be better in HD, but I’m not going to bitch about the picture quality when I’m seeing the first ever Amur Leopard on film.

 This is half true on “It’s a Bit Complicated,” the band’s hotly anticipated sophomore effort. Again, Argos’ vocals aren’t crucial to the album’s artistic concept and the other band members (guitarists Chris Chinchilla and Ian Catskilkin especially) make the album stand out by themselves. However, unlike on “Bang Bang Rock + Roll,” Argos’ lyricism and non-singing aren’t a welcome garnish on an already delicious cake—they actually kind of suck.

 The crazed sarcasm of songs like “Formed a Band” (“We’re gonna be the band/that writes the song/that makes Israel and Palestine get along”) and “Good Weekend,” (I’ve seen her naked TWICE!!!”) has been replaced by a kind of tired, repetitive patois of topics, motifs, and clichés. On “Complicated,” Argos is less Gene Ween and more The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn circa-“Boys and Girls of America,” rehashing old ideas that are admittedly interesting, but without really breathing new life into them. The wistful, tongue-in-cheek “People in Love” is “Complicated”’s “Emily Kane,” the sexually insecure “Jealuos Guy” it’s “Rusted Guns of Milan,” and fan-boy song-about-songs anthem “Sound of Summer” its “My Little Brother.” He does dabble in some newish territory (fame, poverty, being famous and poor), and the album has some snappy lines (“Wet trousers in the washing machine/but I’d rather be damp than seen in jeans”), but overall, Argos’ songwriting has taken a turn for the trite.

The high marks I’ve given this record are really a testament to the music. While Argos seems to have regressed a tad in his writing and delivery, guitarists Chris Chinchilla and Ian Catskilkin have moved well beyond the power chords, and catchy yet undemanding fretwork of “Bang Bang” for guitar stylings that are a bit more complicated (boo-yah!) than either co-lead guitarist is used to. From the cascading syncopations of “I Will Survive” to the crunchy hook of “Jealous Guy” to the irresistible riff of single “Nag Nag Nag Nag,” probably the best music the band has made to date, this is a record propelled by emotionally complex, diverse guitar parts that are as fist-pumping as they are infectiously funny. Similar to how Ween mocks country music by playing perfectly convincing textbook country that is both funny and kind of good, Chinchilla and Catskilkin antagonize music icons like Lou Reed and Thurston Moore by reveling in the kind of grandiosely catchy excess that they oppose, a tactic they hinted at on “Bang Bang” but perfected on “Complicated.”

Ultimately, it is difficult to gauge the sum push-pull between Art Brut’s growth and recession from their first record to their second. The witty anthems of “Bang Bang Rock + Roll” have vanished, only to have been replaced by equally catchy, equally sarcastic guitars. For a band whose MO is so reliant on literacy and verbal wit, it is definitely a problem to go without Argos’ songwriting, but you have to think that—given as much promise as Art Brut has shown on their first two releases—they will eventually find the point where everything clicks. Not to take anything away from what is absolutely a solid album and worthwhile achievement, but as many said after “Bang Bang Rock + Roll,” it looks like it will take one more album for that to happen.

4.14.2007, Rjd2

Tufts Daily

When I first heard that Rjd2, one of the most inspired hip-hop producers of the last decade, was forsaking his turntables to form a live band, the first thing I thought of was how goofy Michael Jordan looked in his White Sox uniform. When His Airness retired from basketball (for the first time), he announced that, he would be pursuing a career in professional baseball. Like RJ, MJ gave up a successful career in one discipline to develop his skills in a similar but basically different pursuit, and like RJ, his move shocked many of his fans.

I thought about it more, though, and I discovered some flaws in my comparison. Baseball requires a particular skill set that Jordan, a good athlete to be sure but not at all a well-trained baseball player, simply did not have. As a ridiculously successful producer and turntablist, RJ already has the ear for subtlety, arrangement skills, and directorial panache that a good bandleader needs. Add to that his music high school background in basic keyboard skills and composition, and on paper, Rjd2’s little experiment seems more likely to succeed than Jordan’s first did.

Remembering Jordan’s “baseball career” (.202 batting average, 11 errors for the Birmingham Barons) and having experienced Rjd2’s new musical direction live, I am convinced that Rjd2 is now the Michael Jordan of independent music. Minor differences aside, the basic formula is the same: guy who excels at one craft takes time away from it to pursue another craft that he fails at. Having seen what Rjd2 and his band are capable of, it is clear that my calculations were wrong: this guy sucks at making music with a band.

Backed by a three-piece of drums, bass, and keys, RJ spent the bulk of the show center stage behind a microphone with a guitar around his neck. It was a weird position for a DJ used to scurrying behind a table, cueing records on four turntables and fiddling with a state-of-the-art sampler, and he definitely looked uncomfortable. At first, I chalked up my staggering displeasure with the music to the discomfort of getting used to seeing one of my favorite DJs clumsily saddled with a guitar and looking like a rock star’s little brother playing dress-up.

But the more I saw of his set, which was comprised largely of songs from 2007’s live-band debut “The Third Hand,” the harder it became for me to deny that the reason I didn’t like the music was because it sucked--horribly. Standing still in the middle of the sold-out floor, I imagined what I would have done if I didn’t know that Rjd2 was in the band onstage. Would I have booed? Lewdly heckled? Would I have shouted “Free Bird!” until someone with a lot of tattoos, even more muscles, and a Boston accent poured PBR on me and kicked my ass?

Ultimately, I decided that I wouldn’t have done anything because I would have assumed they were some kind of student band playing for an Amnesty International rally, and it would have been rude of me to antagonize such do-gooders. Had I seen this band under circumstances that didn’t involve twenty of my own dollars and a night of my life, I would have simply overlooked the faceless, insipid, low-level power-pop and waited until the real band took the stage.

Indeed, without the name recognition of their bandleader, a band as toothlessly boring as RJ and the D2’s would never be headlining a show at a place like the Middle East. In a far cry from his crunching, beat-heavy production, live-band songs like “Have Mercy” and “Sweet Piece” have no galvanizing rhythmic backbone, no when-all-else-fails-just-nod-your-head core to at least pretend to like. With stale keys, lukewarm guitars, and trite, uninteresting lyrics sung in RJ’s cringingly unpolished falsetto, it could have been any group of reasonably trained musicians who have heard The Zombies on stage, and I am still struggling to accept that this band was playing songs written by one of this millennium’s most adored hip-hop visionaries.

You get the feeling that even he knows his experiment has failed. He tried playing old DJ tunes like “Ghostwriter” and “Chicken-Bone Circuit” with his band, and though the old-meets-new formula was better than any of the new songs by themselves, it still sounded soggy, amorphous, and worse than it would have had he just spun the records. Graciously, RJ performed a few remnants from his fabled DJ routines, recreating the retro-funk hip-hop beauty of tracks like “The Horror,” “Smoke and Mirrors,” and “Good Times Roll PT. 2” from 2002’s masterpiece “Deadringer.” It is worth noting that the DJ bits were by far the most rousing parts of the show.

It’s telling when the audience response to an artist’s old material drowns out their response to the new. His DJ set felt, to his credit, like he was throwing a bone to the capacity crowd that bought tickets to see him play songs from his universally panned album, as if he had accepted the limitations of his new project, understood that no one really liked it, and delivered what people actually came to see. As a fan of Rjd2 the DJ, I was pleased to see that the turntablery is still alive and well in his repertoire, but perhaps even more assuring is the fact that the Bulls won three NBA championships after Jordan quit baseball. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, despite the unlistenable direction Rjd2’s music has taken, there will be a reason to see him perform sometime in the future. I sure hope so.