To Have Come So Highly Recommended

The New Pornographers @ Terminal 5 12/6/2010

Moves / Slow Descent Into Alcoholism / It’s Only Divine Right / Crash Years / All the Old Showstoppers / The Laws Have Changed / Jackie Dressed in Cobras / Miss Teen Wordpower / We End Up Together / Adventures in Solitude / Twin Cinema / Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk / Go Places / Hey Snow White / Your Hands (Together) / Mass Romantic / Testament to Youth in Verse / Use It / The Bleeding Heart Show // Challengers / Up in the Dark / Sing Me Spanish Techno

In short, this was an excellent double-bill featuring two of the best power-pop bands on the planet today. I can’t help but feel that both Ted Leo and the New Pornographers have reached a phase in their career in which they’ve come to be under-appreciated. It’s Spoon syndrome — consistency, professionalism, and a distinct creative voice taken for granted by an indie audience more concerned with chasing baby bands in pursuit of firsties than celebrating career artists. I feel like Ted Leo gets this especially bad. He couldn’t possibly ask for more respect from music fans without going back in time to join Sonic Youth, but it seems like the reception for the Brutalist Bricks, arguably his finest record and probably the best straight-up rock album of 2010, has been frustratingly tepid. If you’ve been sleeping on this, give it another chance.

The New Pornographers “We End Up Together”

“We End Up Together” has more or less the same theme as Spoon’s “The Mystery Zone,” and that may have something to do with why I’ve connected with both so deeply over the past year. Both songs are concerned with contingency phases in our lives, and “the times that we met before we met.” Looking back on the past knowing what we know now, and trying to imagine what life was like before it all happened. “We End Up Together” is the more fatalistic of the two songs. There’s a sense of inevitability throughout the lyrics, this retrospective notion that our genes, our engagement in culture and society, our every stupid decision leads to some unavoidable point, and then we die. It’s not romantic. It’s not beautiful. It does, however, have a ring of truth, particularly in the context of this sweeping anthemic tune. When the song reaches its climax, just as Carl Newman sings the title phrase, I tend to think of the wordless backing vocals as some kind of disagreement, an act of rebellion against some rigid fate. It may be good that we are together, but do you really want to just end up together?

Buy it from Amazon.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists @ Terminal 5 12/6/2010

The Mighty Sparrow / Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone? / I’m a Ghost / The Angel’s Share / Where Was My Brain? / The One Who Got Us Out / Even Heroes Have to Die / Bridges, Squares / The Stick / One Polaroid a Day / Bottled in Cork / Timorous Me / The Crane Takes Flight

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “One Polaroid a Day”

Did you read this article in Time Out New York wondering whether social media is ruining New York culture, and by extension culture in general? Have you read any of the probably hundreds of similar articles and blog posts that express more or less the same notion? They always come off as tedious and reactionary, but with some bit of truth buried under all the sanctimony and tunnelvision. Anyway, in this song, Ted Leo gets at that idea with far more grace. To paraphrase: You take yourself out of the moment when you attempt to document it or frame it in yourself when it’s really about something much bigger. It’s more fun when you let go, when you just let things play out. You can come back and think about it later. Memories are more fun than a digital photo gallery! Ted gets at all of this, but he does it with a smile, and a smooth, lightly funky groove. It’s so much better that way.

Buy it from Amazon.