Archive for 2010

Laetitia Sadier “One Million Year Trip”

Laetitia Sadier’s previous non-Stereolab work — Monade, for the most part — sounded too much like Stereolab to fully register as something distinct. This song, from her solo debut, is a bit different. Her voice and aesthetic is too central to Stereolab to sound unlike Stereolab, but in this track, you can hear the essence of her style cut away from that of Tim Gane. “One Million Year Trip” has an intriguing shape to it, full of gentle twists and curves that contrast sharply with Gane’s taste for schematic arrangements and lateral progressions. The tonality, particularly in the guitar, has a sad, emotive quality that has been almost entirely absent from Stereolab music since the late 90s, when Gane’s music became increasingly clinical and remote to the point of negating any attempt on Sadier’s part to invest the songs with emotion, as on her numerous songs mourning the death of her bandmate Mary Hansen.

“One Million Year Trip” is another song about loss and mourning, or more specifically, accepting that someone is gone. The grief is subtle, the emphasis is placed on the process of adjusting and rationalizing: “She went on a million year trip and left everything behind.” There’s a clarity here that I find very moving, particularly as she sings about letting the pain go, acknowledging that “there is no point in holding on.” The notion of death as a voyage into the unknown is an appealing version of the afterlife. I tend to believe that death is the end of the line, but we can’t really know. If anyone would, it’d be the dead, out there on a journey through eternal oblivion.

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Scissor Sisters @ Terminal 5 8/25/2010

Night Work / Laura / Any Which Way / She’s My Man / Something Like This / Whole New Way / Tits On The Radio / Harder You Get / Running Out / Take Your Mama / Kiss You Off / I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ / Skin Tight / Skin This Cat / Fire With Fire / Paul McCartney / Night Life // Comfortably Numb / Invisible Light / Filthy/Gorgeous

If you have only encountered the Scissor Sisters’ studio output and music videos, it would make sense if you thought Ana Matronic was just a sidekick or a back-up singer. She gets one spotlight track per album, and her personality doesn’t fully translate in the studio. On stage, it’s another story. There she’s central to the group’s appeal, and just as charismatic as Jake Shears. She’s a delight to behold — gorgeous, sassy, immensely entertaining. She’s the emcee, the hype woman, the foil. She is the woman that drag queens aspire to become. Scissor Sisters shows wouldn’t be nearly as fun without her. If only every pop band had someone like her. Bless you, Ana Matronic!

Scissor Sisters “Harder You Get”

The audience for this show was fine and fun, but it seemed as though a significant chunk of the audience wasn’t super familiar with the new material from Night Work. This is to be expected whenever a band tours shortly after releasing a record — a lot of the point of touring for an album is to introduce your fans to new tunes — but it was a little disappointing. Out of all the Night Work selections, the two that clearly connected with the crowd were “Harder You Get” and “Running Out,” which happen to be my favorites, followed closely by “Invisible Light” and “Skin This Cat.” It’s not surprising that these two rocked-up songs would get people going. They’re both just slightly off-brand enough to reveal something new about the band, and allow for a lot of physicality on stage.

“Harder You Get”, with its Judas Priest-gone-disco vibe, comes alive on the stage, and Shears revels in the opportunity to slip into domineering leather daddy mode. It’s the best example of the wonderfully sleazy, aggressively sexual place they’ve gone to on Night Work, and I’d love it if they explored this S&M quasi-metal style some more in the future. Or I could just put it on repeat, which is usually how I hear it. Which, of course, explains why when they finished performing it last night, I just wanted them to start over and play it again.

Buy it from Amazon.

Electric Six “After Hours”

The world of Electric Six is tasteless and full of preening, anxious douchebags. It’s sad and desperate and vulgar and dumb. It’s basically the culture that we are trying to escape when we embrace things like indie rock. “After Hours,” the opening number on the band’s seventh album, sounds like the theme song to an expensive, ultra-tacky Meatpacking District bar full of all those mysterious affluent people moving into all those new luxury high-rises. It’s a bad scene. The music has a frightened urgency; Dick Valentine spits out his lines with maximum venom, his voice whipping you at the end of every line — HOURS, HOURS! FIRED, FIRED! He sounds bitter and disgusted, resigned to being trapped in this stupid, stupid hell. It’s meant to be funny in a grim sort of way, but it’s getting to the point that Valentine’s deadpan satire is starting to just come across like realism. What is even exaggerated anymore? You scrape away the humorous hyperbole and the ironic distance, and it’s a scathing indictment of idiocy and excess: “That’s how organs shut down and brain cells DIE.”

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This time last year I was visiting my father at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side nearly every day of the week. He had been sick for years, but had generally been living life normally until his luck started to run out somewhere around June. He was hospitalized in late July, and except for a brief stint back at home, he was there through the end of September. After that, he returned back to the house he bought in his early 20s, the house where I grew up, and he died in mid-October. I’m glad it happened there, and not at the hospital. It’s how he wanted it to be. In my mind, though, my father died at Sloan-Kettering center, and I watched it happen slowly in small installments spread out over days. Every truly painful memory is tied to that place, when he finally passed away at home, it was mercy. It was relief.

I hadn’t been in that neighborhood since then. It’s on the far eastern edge of Manhattan in the north 60s and there isn’t much reason for me to ever be around there. I recently got it in my mind that I should go back up there, walk around. Not so much in this “I need to confront something” sort of way, but more like…on some level I missed the routine of taking long walks in that area every day. I put it off for a while, in part because I knew that, yes, I was going to have to confront something, but I finally went back there last Thursday. As it turns out, there really wasn’t much to face. It was mostly a matter of retracing lines. The incredible anger, depression, and hopelessness I felt at the time when I was in that area every day — most of it to do with my dad, but certainly not all of it — was long gone. All that was there for me was nostalgia, and passing through familiar places tied to bad memories.

I mostly thought of songs. Animal Collective was a revelation to me back then. They’re about my age, they’d been through some similar things, and expressed something about those experiences in ways that resonated with me in a comforting way. There’s this patch of 68th or 69th Street near 1st Avenue that’s tied in with Liz Phair’s “Explain It To Me.” I spent most of my time with music that echoed my anger and despair. The problem was, there really wasn’t very much of it, and none of what worked for me was at all recent. The records that really did the trick for me at this point in time were Hole’s Live Through This, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and Nirvana’s In Utero. I feel like at some point in the mid 90s, rage and anguish became very uncool in music, and was more or less ceded to metal, emo, post-grunge, etc, and in those genres, expressing these negative feelings was often just a hollow, and in many cases very petty and whiny, ritual. I have my theories as to why this happened, but as it stands, it’s rare to find clever, tuneful musicians expressing agony and fury these days.

Hole “Violet”

It’s not like just anyone can make music like this. The pain really has to be there, and I think most of us can tell the difference between a singer who is really putting it out there vs. someone who is servicing the conventions of their chosen genre. I hate to say this, but I don’t think an artist can go to this place without a complex of mental health issues. Depression, narcissism, exhibitionism, self-destructive impulses, the works. Craft is important too — you want something with hooks, something with thoughtful dynamics, not just a bunch of formless bile. It goes deeper when it’s actually musical, when the artist really knows how to make you feel how they feel. How many people really have the combination of problems and talents necessary to produce this stuff? And the support system too! Labels simply don’t have the funds to bankroll brilliant basket cases like they did back in the boom years.

So yes, an album like Live Through This is sort of a miracle. The two songs from that record that worked for me last summer were “Softer, Softest” and “Violet.” The former tapped into my feeling of impotence and hopelessness, and I still wince every time I hear Courtney Love sing “the abyss opens up, it steals everything from me.” That image was so vivid and real to me at the time. Everything was going wrong, and I could only be passive. “Violet” expresses a painful passivity too, but it doesn’t sound like it. The chorus is all desperate surrender — “GO ON, TAKE EVERYTHING!” — but even if Courtney didn’t follow that up with a bitter “I dare you to,” it would still sound entirely defiant. The song has the dynamics of a brutal storm. You hold tight in those lulls, the chorus blasts at you like a choir of hurricanes.

Hole “Softer, Softest”

The loudness and violent dynamics in this music is the key to what makes it so therapeutic. The cathartic peaks makes it feel as though you’re fighting back. “Softer, Softest” sounds fragile for the most part, and unusually pretty for a Hole song. It’s not a song that demands for a release, but when it comes, the shift in scale is jarring. Courtney sounds small in the first two minutes, she sings about feeling powerless. When the song builds up, it’s like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk. The tiny, wounded woman is gone, replaced by this rampaging, avenging giant: “BRING ME BACK HER HEAD!” It’s empowering. It’s not real, but that’s part of what makes it so important: It’s a clear example of art giving you something that you need that you can’t often have in reality.

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Steely Dan “Peg”

As a direct result of reading Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, I’ve been thinking a lot about methods of recording, the way things sound, and the way people respond to various technological advances and the resulting aesthetic decisions. One of the aesthetics I find most interesting at the moment is the very “dry” sound that was very popular in the 70s, most especially the stuff that was recorded in California. Steely Dan is an extreme example of this style — clean to the point of being sterile; jazz/rock fusion performed with surgical precision. I get why a lot of people hate this sound. If you want guts and grit in your music, this is the radical opposite. It’s not physical, it’s not soulful. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made ruthlessly cerebral music, and everything that made it to their records was a fully formed idea rendered as perfectly as possible. Every sound in the recordings is discrete, nothing bleeds together. It’s not meant to simulate the sound of people playing together, it’s just a pure representation of a musical arrangement.

Solos, traditionally an aspect of music that at least offers the front of being a moment of inspired expression, were auditioned. Fagen and Becker ran through seven session players before finding the ideal solo for “Peg,” a song that would become one of their most memorable and zippy productions. If you watch this video, the duo play a few of the rejected solos, and it becomes clear why they were so picky. Those solos were awful, just really tacky and lifeless. The keeper, performed by Jay Graydon, is among my favorite guitar solos ever, in part for its fantastic contrast with the rest of the composition. The center of the piece is the interplay between this exceptionally sleek keyboard part and the subtle syncopation of the drums — tightly written and performed, but it comes out sounding fluid and intuitive. When the solo comes in, this already mellow tune seems to relax and slide into this even more stylish and smooth zone. The guitar tone is astonishing — rich, but with a touch of distortion — and the notes glide along the track with an unreal grace. You could record “Peg” in other ways and the song and that solo would still be great, but think the nuances in the arrangement and performance are flattered by the understated, dry approach. Nothing is oversold, nothing is obscured.

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Steely Dan “Show Biz Kids”

The dry sound suited Steely Dan in part because the music itself was so cool and aloof. The lyrics have a bitter, deadpan wit; they lean hard on irony and unreliable narration. It’s cynical music about cynical people, so there’s no room for warmth. “Show Biz Kids,” from their second album, is a prime example of their fixation on shallowness and sleaze. As the title suggests, the singer is talking about hedonistic young LA creeps — it’s basically a Bret Easton Ellis novel before such a thing existed. It’s perhaps uncharacteristically judgmental, but I think we’re meant to think the narrator is an asshole too. The arrangement is brilliant. The guitar part is relatively loose and dirty for them, it’s the most dynamic presence in this piece that mostly sticks to this dead-eyed repetitive groove. The backing vocalists sound like they’re in a trance, the chorus runs even colder. It’s a grim sound — Los Angeles rendered as hell with palm trees and swimming pools.

The best part is a temporary shift out of the main groove at 3:48, as the beat is enhanced by a metallic jangle and Fagan delivers a sharp indictment: “Show business kids / making movies of themselves / you know they don’t give a fuck / about anybody else.” In context, it’s catharsis, but it’s an extremely fleeting moment that disrupts the listener’s desire to linger longer on that part. Super Furry Animals looped the last line into something more crowd pleasing; Elvis Costello’s cover version hits that part with a sputtering rage. Those interpretations have their appeal, but I prefer Becker and Fagan’s intentions — you only get to feel that muted indignation for a few seconds before you slip back into that creepy complacency.

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Steely Dan “Parker’s Band”

“Parker’s Band” is basically Steely Dan’s equivalent to Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” a song expressing appreciation and admiration for a jazz great. (For Stevie, it’s Duke Ellington; for the Dan, it’s Charlie Parker.) This is as earnest and effervescent as Steely Dan gets. Though they made a lot of music that errs closer to jazz than rock, this is certainly a rock song about jazz music. That’s a lot of the appeal — the rock aspect of this conveys enthusiasm and echoes wonder in the lyrics, though the jazzy touches in the syncopation of the drums lends the piece an usually breezy grace. I love the way the percussion and horns have a weightless quality in the mix, and seem to casually orbit the guitar at the center of the arrangement. It’s not as extraordinarily ecstatic as Stevie’s tune, but there’s certainly a lot of joy in this track.

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This is the conclusion of my interview with Rob Sheffield, author of the excellent new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. In this segment, we discuss the value of famous artists and famous songs, Lady Gaga’s indifference to the straight dude’s gaze, pro-girl songs, and Rob’s eternal love for Stacey Q and Scritti Politti.

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My interview with Rob Sheffield, author of the new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, continues here. In this segment, we talk about the incredible cultural power of MTV in the 80s and 90s, the importance of pop stars, and the tacky brilliance of the cassingle.

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My interview with Rob Sheffield, author of the new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, continues here. In this part of our conversation, we discuss the “First-Week One-Listen Piffle” school of music criticism, buying albums on the day of release, and the way drugs ruined the rock stars of the ’90s.

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My interview with Rob Sheffield, author of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, continues here. This is the point where things start to get very fun, as we talk about Michael Jackson, Prince, “hey DJ!” songs, Sonic Youth, and Thurston Moore’s brilliant song “Psychic Hearts.”

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The last time I interviewed music critic Rob Sheffield on this site, he had just released his excellent and heartbreaking memoir Love Is a Mix Tape. That book told the story of loving and eventually losing his first wife in the context of the music and mix tapes they shared. His second memoir, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, has just recently been released. Over the course of this week, I’ll be running a long discussion we had last week that touches on — among many other things! — the value of pop stars, “pro-girl” songs, the cultural power of MTV in the 80s and 90s, and what Rob calls the “First-Week One-Listen Piffle” school of music criticism. Here’s the first part of our talk. Enjoy, and stay tuned!

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Matthew Dear “You Put A Smell On Me”

The title is lewd, but not quite as lewd as the synthesizers sound. The synths writhe and thrust with the beat, essentially abstract but leaving very little to the imagination. The lyrics are mostly intentionally flimsy double-entendres, to the point that it’s almost sort of cute that he’s even trying to be polite about this. I like that the voice is a deep, breathy, garbled thing — not quite natural, it’s like putting on a costume: “I’m going to be this man tonight.” To a large extent, this song is about making a conscious decision to get sleazy. It’s about saying, “Yes, I am going to get out there and live this night like it’s a goth version of Prince’s “Erotic City.”” Or, failing that, a better version of Squarepusher’s “My Red Hot Car.”

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As you almost certainly know by now, Edgar Wright’s film adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comic is about to open in movie theaters this weekend. To celebrate this, I’m rerunning an interview with Bryan that I conducted June of 2006, right around the time the third book in the series came out.

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series of digest-sized graphic novels have quickly become some of my favorite comics of all time, and that’s saying quite a lot given my lifelong history with the medium. O’Malley’s series is a giddy rush of comedy, romance, and absurd action, with a brilliant high concept — charismatic layabout Scott Pilgrim must defeat his new girlfriend Ramona Flowers’ seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to stay with her — that warps a classic video game convention into an offbeat metaphor about learning how to cope with the romantic past of both your partner and yourself. Though comics are often associated with wish fulfillment, it’s actually quite rare to find many contemporary books (mainstream, indie, or otherwise) that bother with that sort of thing, much less embrace it as O’Malley does in the series. If you don’t find yourself wanting to be Scott Pilgrim (Super cute girls love him! He’s in a band! He’s got cool friends! He’s a hero!), you’ll probably develop a crush on Kim Pine, want a cool roommate like Wallace Wells, or wish that you could have a nemesis half as fabulous as Envy Adams.

In this interview, Bryan Lee O’Malley discusses the origins of the series, his background in music, the potential film adaptation of the comic, and his tendency to conflate video games that he has played with actual lived experience.

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Erykah Badu “Turn Me Away (Get Munny)”

On the surface, “Turn Me Away (Get Munny)” sounds light and affectionate, flirty and uncomplicated. This is the image the character in the song wants to project as she attempts to insinuate herself into a rich man’s life, doing anything necessary to stake a claim to his economic stability. Badu’s words aren’t flattering or particularly empathetic — it’s more of a caricature than a character study — so the emphasis is mainly on this woman’s calculation and desperation. It’s a cynical song about a cynical person, but the bitterness is cut by the wicked humor in Badu’s lyrics and the sweetness of its melodies. It’s a musical honey trap.

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Raindeer “Dark Place”

“Dark Place” starts out swooning, and then just gets swoonier from there on out, rolling out in gentle waves of harmony and synthetic texture over a stiff metronomic beat. The singer promises to someday take you to their dark place, but it doesn’t sound like such a scary thing — it comes out sounding romantic, sweet, generous, intimate. How bad could that dark place be when the song sounds so pretty, gentle, and thoughtful? It all feels a bit tentative, but in a hopeful way: He wants that trust to be earned, because love is most true when you can open up and reveal yourself and all your flaws and still feel accepted for who you are.

Get it for free from Raindeer’s Bandcamp site.

Joanna Newsom “Esme”

Joanna Newsom is a wordy type, and although she writes with great precision, you can often pull out a line or two that gets to the heart of what she is singing so that all the rest is just detail and elaboration. In the case of “Esme,” it’s just two words: “Kindness prevails!” That declaration comes nearly five minutes into the composition, a moment of climactic epiphany in its gorgeous, slowly unfolding hymn-like melody. Newsom is singing to a young girl, marveling at her beauty and recalling the joy and generosity that met her arrival to this world. It’s an optimistic song in the face of great hardship, a piece of music that reminds both the subject and the listener that humanity is capable of incredible innate kindness and love. The tune is fragile and elegant, arranged only for Newsom’s voice and her harp, and it perfectly conveys its sentiment of thoughtful, intense sweetness. In lesser hands, “Esme” would be a sugary, simplistic Hallmark card; Newsom’s song is like a carefully considered, highly poetic long form letter.

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Robyn @ Webster Hall 8/5/2010

Fembot / Cry When You Get Older / Cobra Style / Dancing On My Own / Who’s That Girl? / Dancehall Queen / The Girl And The Robot / Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do / Be Mine! // Dream On / With Every Heartbeat

Robyn “Dancing On My Own”

I saw Robyn perform a few weeks ago at the Pitchfork festival in Chicago, and it was nice. But it was nothing like this. This show was intense, the response to the music was exactly what you’d hope for when you imagine a Robyn concert in your mind. Aside from one show being a festival gig and the other being a club show, the major difference is that the audience at Webster Hall was about 80% gay men. Gay men are pretty much the best audience ever — passionate, devoted, eager to dance, sing along, and show the artist love. You might think I am overrating this, but if you’re thinking that you probably haven’t seen a show under similar conditions. Anyway, the emotional and physical energy hit its peak with “Dancing On My Own.” Feelings of insecurity and sorrow for unrequited love were channeled into this beautiful, absolutely perfect dance pop song, making a lie of the title phrase — we may all have been in our heads, but we definitely weren’t dancing on our own.

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Kelis @ Webster Hall 8/5/2010

Emancipate / Scream / Trick Me / Holiday – Milkshake / 4th Of July / Lil Star / Brave / 22nd Century / Millionaire / Get Along With You / Acapella

Kelis “Acapella”

I want to like Kelis’ dance diva make-over more than I do. “Acapella” is amazing and undeniable, but the rest of her new album is just shy of her mark. A lot of it comes down to the hooks — they are there, but aside from the best bits of “Acapella,” they’re sorta vague and overly repetitive, and don’t have quite enough emotional resonance. Kelis is trying hard though, and I give her a lot of credit, even if it seems like a pretty blatant grab for a gay audience now that she doesn’t have much of a place in R&B or mainstream pop. She’s a good performer, or at least a flashy one — she looked kinda like a black version of Dazzler from the X-Men — and older songs like “Millionaire” and a mash-up of Madonna’s “Holiday” and her hit “Milkshake” came off well. She’s not totally there just yet, but I can see her growing into this new act over time.

Buy it from Amazon.

Arcade Fire @ Madison Square Garden 8/4/2010

Ready To Start / Laika / No Cars Go / Haiti / No Celebration / Rococo / The Suburbs / Crown Of Love / Intervention / We Used To Wait / Power Out / Rebellion (Lies) / Month Of May / Tunnels // Keep The Car Running / Mountains Beyond Mountains / Wake Up

As can be expected, the Arcade Fire did great at their first Madison Square Garden show. I mean, duh, right? They’ve always been an arena band, and playing this show was basically them living out their destiny. I’m not really sure where they could go from here, actually, other than decline. They’re probably not going to get any bigger, and if you look at the albums, Win Butler has basically gone through his story arc in reverse: grew up in the suburbs, got alienated and decided that he doesn’t wanna live in America anymore, moved to Montreal and had meaningful experiences in the city. Unless he wants to go further back the next time around — Arcade Fire’s The Babies? — they’re going to have to dream it all up again. Or not! This show made it perfectly clear that they can dine out on Funeral for the rest of their lives.

The strange thing about this concert is that whenever the band played oldies, particularly the tracks from Funeral, the non-Win members would all be super energetic and animated. You know, they’d be doing their Arcade Fire thing, jumping around and banging on things and everyone singing and playing and moving at once. This plays very well in an arena, and that energy is reflected by the audience. However, with the exception of “Month of May,” whenever they would do songs from their new album, they all just kinda played their parts and didn’t put on much of a show. I’m not sure why they did this. Maybe they’re not confident enough in playing the new songs to indulge in theater while performing them? Maybe they don’t like those songs as much as Win does? I have no idea. I get the feeling that they’re misdirecting their energies, though — the audience doesn’t need to get more amped up for the Funeral hits, they respond to those with an intensely passionate fervor. They do, however, need to get led on the new songs, and aside from Win, the group doesn’t seem invested in doing that.

Arcade Fire “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”

I’ve read some very harsh criticism of the new Arcade Fire album that basically makes it out to be this big blinking sign reading SUBURBS BAD, CITY GOOD. I feel like that misses the point somewhat. There’s not a lot of ambiguity on the album, but it’s not quite as reductive as that. “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” the album’s best and most aesthetically surprising song, essentially summarizes the entire record, and it’s basically the same song we’ve heard hundreds of times in rock music: “I’m bored with my life! I want to express myself! I want escape! I want excitement! I want salvation!” When I was a teenager living in the suburbs, this song was “Silent Kid,” it was “1979,” it was “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.” This is just an essential part of rock and pop music; it’s a major part of the human condition. Does the record overstate the promise of the artsy city life? Yes, of course. Does it over-romanticize the purity of youth, and state a distrust for the institutions of adult life? Sure. But this is rock music, and that’s par for the course.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains” is beautiful and effective in part because it is fairly nuanced — you get the desire to leave, the dissatisfaction with the sprawl and the malls and the endless nothing-much that characterizes so much of the space in North America, but more than anything, you hear this excitement for possibility and change. The album starts out in an idyllic rut, but it ends with this song which looks off to the future, hoping for something better. The singer is still stuck in the same old place, but she’s got a destination in mind, and suddenly the world just has more of a sparkle to it.

Buy it from Amazon.

Spoon @ Madison Square Garden 8/4/2010

Me And The Bean (Britt solo) / Nobody Gets Me But You / The Underdog / Stay Don’t Go / Trouble Comes Running / The Ghost Of You Lingers / Written In Reverse / Don’t You Evah / I Turn My Camera On / Don’t Make Me A Target / I Summon You / Jonathon Fisk / You Got Yr Cherry Bomb / Got Nuffin / Black Like Me

Spoon “Nobody Gets Me But You”

I wasn’t sure how Spoon would translate in an arena, but I think that they did pretty great. This is mostly thanks to the presence of Britt Daniel, whose swagger and charisma comes across very well without having to do anything in the way of Bono-ish antics. A horn section added oomph to a few of the songs, but they didn’t really need it — in fact, the songs that relied the most on groove were the ones that went over the best. They are ultimately more of a club and large theater band, but they play with enough style and authority that I think they could do well in most any venue. When this set ended, I was totally satisfied, and the imminent Arcade Fire set was like a bonus round.

Buy it from Amazon.

Owen Pallett @ Madison Square Garden 8/4/2010

This Lamb Sells Condos / This Is The Dream Of Win & Regine / Midnight Directives / Lewis Takes Action / The Butcher / The Great Elsewhere / Lewis Takes Off His Shirt

Owen Pallett “Lewis Takes Off His Shirt”

Owen Pallett is a one-man string ensemble with a pretty, delicate voice and arty. Needless to say, his music is not exactly built for arenas. Nevertheless, I think he came off well, especially given that he was playing in the “people slowly trickle into the room” time slot. I think his singing is more impressive live than on record — there’s a reedy quality to his voice that has a more appealing resonance in a big room than transmitting through small speakers. He was very charming too, which helped a lot. I find it easy to get on this guy’s side.

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Teengirl Fantasy “Cheaters”

“Cheaters” is built around the a cappella track of the Love Committee’s “Cheaters Never Win” to such an extent that it’s probably more accurately considered to be a remix than an entirely new song. Teengirl Fantasy use pretty much the entire vocal, but they completely alter the tone of the piece, stripping away the cheeriness of the original tune and placing a far greater emphasis on the drama of the lyrics. Contrasted with a steady, emotionally neutral house track, the vocals take on a hysterical, frenzied quality. It’s a simple hot/cold dynamic, but it has a poetic quality, as though you’re slowly fading out of a numb state and coming back to an intense reality that seems a bit too absurd to be true.

Buy it from True Panther Sounds.

St. Vincent @ Central Park Summerstage 8/1/2010

The Strangers / Save Me From What I Want / Actor Out Of Work / Jesus Saves, I Spend / Just The Same But Brand New / The Neighbors / Laughing With A Mouth Of Blood / The Bed / Black Rainbow / Marrow / Your Lips Are Red // The Party

St. Vincent “Black Rainbow”

Ahhh, the ruthless perfection of St. Vincent. This was a remarkable set — technically astonishing, yet with enough deviations from recorded arrangements and small moments of improvisation to keep things fresh and in the moment. This was a special show. In addition to her usual quintet, she added a three man horn section and a five-piece mini-orchestra, all without ever bogging down the sound. I was most excited for “The Neighbors,” a seldom-performed favorite of mine, but “Black Rainbow” may have been the highlight as the additional players added richness and detail to the sound without doing anything to compromise Clark’s light, delicate melodies.

Buy it from Amazon.

Tune-Yards @ Central Park Summerstage 8/31/2010

Do You Wanna Live? / What’s That About? / Powa / My Hood / Fiya / Real Live Flesh / Sunlight / Hatari / Don’t Take My Life Away

Tune-Yards “Real Live Flesh”

The second Tune-Yards album can’t come quickly enough. The existing recordings are very good, but don’t do enough to showcase exactly how jaw-dropping Merrill Garbus has become as a live performer. I would go so far to say that she may be one of the greatest singers in the world today. The raw quality of her voice is phenomenal, but the originality of her style is what gets you — very controlled, but raw, playful, sexy, commanding, masculine, feminine. About half the songs were performed as usual, as either a duo or Garbus by herself, but the rest included a seven-piece band assembled for the occasion. This was incredible, and I can only hope that she does more of this in the future. Maybe she doesn’t need the extra percussion or the guitarist, but oh man, the horn section? Brilliant, perfect, wonderful. If you are on the fence about this band, you need to see them live and you will become a very big fan. It’s that simple.

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Basia Bulat “Run”

Basia Bulat is adorable. She can seem a bit solemn on record — her voice somewhat resembles that of the wholesome, dour Natalie Merchant — but in person, she is very friendly and smiley, which helps put over her performance. It’s just nice to see someone have fun up there, you know? Her set was low-key but dynamic, with several shifts in arrangement — acoustic guitar, mandolin, autoharp — that kept the sound lively and fresh. Her songs are small, gentle things with subtle charms that can flattened a bit in the studio, but in concert they open up and breathe. Loose and casual is the way to go with this music.

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Sonic Youth @ Prospect Park Bandshell 7/31/2010

Candle / Brother James / Catholic Block / Stereo Sanctity / Hey Joni / The Sprawl / Cross The Breeze / The Wonder / Hyperstation / White Cross / Mote / Shaking Hell // Shadow Of A Doubt / Silver Rocket / Expressway To Yr Skull

Sonic Youth “Stereo Sanctity”

Mark Ibold was not available for this performance, and so the band performed a set in which the most recent song was released in 1990. This was very cool, but also sort of odd, in that I feel somewhat uncomfortable with them totally ignoring twenty years of their career in choosing what to play. Granted, songs from A Thousand Leaves on through Sonic Nurse have been cut from the live repertoire for some time now and pretty much everything from NYC Ghosts and Flowers onward is arranged for a quintet, but still. This was a fine show, but it was bogged down a bit by the simple fact that I am still burned out on much of the Daydream Nation material and would’ve much preferred that they played more from Evol and Sister — how about “Schizophrenia,” “Cotton Crown,” and “Tom Violence” instead of “The Wonder”, “Hyperstation”, and “Silver Rocket”? — but that’s my own problem I guess. I’ve seen Sonic Youth so many times now that I’m afraid I take this stuff for granted. It was awesome to finally get to see them do “Stereo Sanctity” though. That was totally awesome. Also, there is no way that I will ever be bored with “Candle,” “Brother James,” “White Cross,” “Shadow of a Doubt” or “Expressway To Yr Skull.”

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Candy Claws “Sunbeam Show”

Candy Claws are a duo from Colorado who make music to evoke the power and mystery of nature. Their previous album attempted to mimic the sound of the ocean floor; their latest is inspired by a 1970 book titled The Secret Life of the Forest. If you only just listen casually, you may not get exactly what they’re going for — it mostly just sounds like an extremely ethereal take on Brian Wilson, and the lyrics are almost entirely obscure by the softness of their voices — but in the context of their stated project, it’s easy to imagine this as an abstracted impression of the forest. Sometimes it feels like we’re zooming in on a detail, other parts express a widescreen grandeur. Beyond the soft-focus surface, the arrangements are surprisingly nuanced, full of interesting textures, subtle melodies, and unexpected rhythms. The quality of the album is similar to that of its subject matter — pretty but matter-of-fact at first, but intriguing upon closer investigation.

Buy it from Amazon. I recommend holding out for a physical copy, though, as the packaging of this album is lovely and highly informative.