Live At The Garden

Run the Jewels “Call Ticketron”

Run the Jewels have been great from the start, but I think it’s taken them a bit to transition from “project” to full-time collaborators. The intensity and chemistry has always been there, but Killer Mike and El-P sound emboldened by the realization that RTJ has becoming the defining work of their long careers, and seem thrilled to give the people what they want. These are guys who’ve built their reputations on projecting confidence, but they’ve never seemed as sure of themselves as they do on these new songs. It must help to know when you’re writing songs exactly how excited people will be to hear them, and what will make people lose their shit when you perform live. “Call Ticketron” is one of the songs that seems built specifically for the live show – there’s the “l-l-l-live from the Garden” refrain, sure, but it’s more in the way the track contrasts its vast negative space with a rhythm that tightens up a lot before releasing the tension. El-P and Mike switch up their approaches to the beat through the song, with the former lurking around it at the start, and the latter ratcheting up the tension in his last verse by packing in the syllables and leaning into internal rhyme.

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