Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band
The Warfield; San Francisco, CA
Oscar Wilde said a few centuries ago that "All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." This idea is consoling to those of us who are frustrated by the impasse between what is and what could be, echoed in Bright Eyes' infamous "Road To Joy" line, "No one ever plans to wake up in the gutter/ Sometimes that's just the most comfortable place."
Conor Oberst’s songwriting no longer seems informed or, better, made necessary by the kind of suffering that renders spooning a sewage drain attractive. He has broken away from Bright Eyes to form Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and with this change has comes music that abandons high-stake confessionalism for a safer brand of rock. If that gutter quote from It's Morning, I'm Wide Awake (2005) epitomizes Bright Eyes, more relevant to Conor’s solo work are lyrics from his new limited edition EP: Gentelman's Pact: "Life's not fair/ I tried to die young with my true love/ Ended up a millionaire."
This shift to the middle is omnipresent at The Warfield on October 24. The effect of this change from the tortured king of emo to "the Paul Simon of indie rock" (we'll get to that later) has been to create more mainstream fans — at the price of estranging his loyal core of followers.
With $9 Fernet shots and limited ins-and-outs for smokers, my crew and I are a little put-off at the outset of the show. I am with Alexandra Vesalga, a 27-year-old and 8-year fan; Alison Burke, a 19-year-old and 6-year fan; and Mike Rowell, a music writer for the SF Weekly.
All Smiles opens the show, followed by the all-girl trio The Like. Vesalga compares these openers with past choices, saying that "I have seen Her Space Holiday and The Faint open for Bright Eyes. On the Cassadaga tour, Jim James opened with a solo performance. Those three artists are definitely on par musically with Bright Eyes. The Like was pretty good, but I find it interesting that he picked bands so obviously not on that level of musical ingenuity with his past openers. It's kind of a mainstream band move, like how you don't want an artist to open with a set as good as yours."
Oberst's set is a hybrid of classic rock and alt-country, with only undertones of the deathly eloquent songwriting that put him in the club with other starry-eyed gutter punks. Alison Burke says that her favorite songs of the night are "Eagle on a Pole" and "Milk Thistle," the two that most channel the Bright Eyes style. "I thought the other songs were regressing back to the ’70s, like ripping off past music phases. Aside from that, I just didn't really feel the connection that I felt with his music in the past. I didn't leave feeling the same way at all."
Mike Rowell (the music writer in tote) says that "The songs weren't bad, but they didn't move me the way older Bright Eyes stuff has, and they smacked of generic rockism. Whether he's deliberately shooting for wider appeal with his classic retro-rock stylings, who knows."
Rowell tells me that, when they met around 2002, Oberst said he had taken up smoking so that his voice would be more gravelly. Gravelly it may be, but not muddled. It drives a clear yet rough cut through the instrumentation, and you can tell that the songs have been written in a way that keeps the lyrics front-and-center. "I thought the music was orchestrated well,” Vesalga says. “Nate Walcott does all the horns, strings and keys and he's a genius. But I think since his old producer Mike Mogis left, the band has lacked an experimental side. It's been really regimented. There is a classically-trained element driving it."
This control aspect spills into the songwriting, too. "He's abandoning the way he writes, which has always been a huge quality that people commended him for," Burke says. "He's not singing about himself anymore, and he's being very influenced by other artists — people like Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. He's trying to go down that road instead of the one he created for himself 14 years ago."
Vesalga also comments on this turning-outward. "Some of his songs are still really good, but it seems that he's trying to appeal more to a mass audience so there are very few of those songs that feel true and are really moving. Bright Eyes was always a very introspective songwriting outfit that showed the most extreme ugly and beautiful sides of the world from one person's perspective. It was very relatable; I think a lot of people identified with it. Likewise, I think many people hated it because it was so extreme."
"I did think the cover of Paul Simon's ‘Kodachrome’ was telling," Rowell says. "It seems he's a younger guy rediscovering the ’70s, and everything old is new again. Unfortunately, while ‘Kodachrome’ is an admittedly catchy song, I was never that hot on it, even back in the day. If Conor wants to be the modern-day Paul Simon, that's fine, but don't expect me to be too enthusiastic about it."
"It's hard for me to say whether I will see him again," Burke says. "I'm such a huge Bright Eyes fan, and I've loved him for years. If he were with Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, I don't know if I would — unless the next album was more genuine."
I ask Vesalga what she would say if he were right in front of her and asked her opinion of the show. "I would hope that I would say I'm really disappointed in his choices," she answers. "But I don't know if I could even speak."
They Might Be Giants
(Le) Poisson Rouge; New York, NY
I grew up listening to They Might Be Giants with my band nerd friends in high school. And I am willing to admit that most of my useless trivia knowledge comes from their extensive song library. We all know that old New York was once New Amsterdam for a reason, but did anyone appreciate our 11th president (James K. Polk) until 1996? I didn't think so; the man seized the whole southwest from Mexico!
Upon entering (Le) Poisson Rouge, I realized that the crowd was much older than I expected. Many of those in attendance probably saw They Might Be Giants when they broke in the early-’90s, and they keep coming back. The band has one of the most dedicated fanbases out there. They have brilliantly maintained an aging base while developing a younger one by releasing two children's albums. As the show progressed, at least four people surrounding me were keeping track of the 41-song setlist.
The venue is smaller than I would have expected. (Le) Poisson Rouge touts itself as being able to hold up to and over 800 people, but it didn't feel like it. Rouge has a very intimate feeling. These guys could be doing decent-sized venues across the countries, but have chosen to put on several smaller shows in New York City from late-2008 through early-2009. Each NYC show had an overall theme to the night, and I attended the playing of Flood, the band's 1990 major label release. It was this album, with tracks like "Birdhouse in your Soul" and "Particle Man," that really transitioned them from college rock staples to alternative gods.
Bathed in fuchsia and turquoise, the band ascended the three steps that caused them to tower over the crowd. Surrounded by horns to their left and a seasoned gig band to their backs John Linnell and John Flansburgh launched into the album's first track, "Theme From Flood." The "hardest working band still taking the L train" would play the entirety of Flood for their first set and then take a quick break and return for a second set.
Its interesting to see Linnell and Flansburgh interacting on stage together. While Flansburgh flails around and is full of energy, Linnell remains stoic, playing the keyboard or accordion with very small but deliberate movements. From the start, you can tell this is a band that has been playing together for a very long time. Throughout Flood, the band remained traditionalists and tried to recreate what they recorded in 1990, even going so far as listening to their own album to figure out how "Istanbul" was executed.
As the set break came and went, the band transformed. I was impressed by the first set, but it didn't feel quite like a show -- it was as if they were going through the motions so they could get to the second set quickly. When that time came, the band became far more animated. These were the hits that we all know and love. Not to diminish Flood, I just couldn't wait to hear "S-E-X-X-Y" any longer.
The second set featured too many gems to mention. One of the best parts was the inclusion of the new song, "Why Does the Sun Really Shine? (The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma)," a response to "Why Does The Sun Shine?" Turns out their explanation of how the sun functions was incorrect -- it isn't a mass of incandescent gas; it involves a fourth state of matter, plasma. Throughout the show, there was a quiet echo of people singing every word to every song. This was only evident when the band would switch something up or slow down the tempo, revealing the audience's conditioning to their favorite songs.
Since the first time I heard "Particle Man" on Tiny Tunes Adventures and growing up with Apollo 18 in my head, I had wanted to see TMBG. It was an incredible show if only for the versatility alone. After 20+ years of being strange guys, The Johns are comfortable with their career, and I don't see TMBG slowing down anytime soon.
Setlist:
Sunn O))): Grimmrobe Demo 10th Anniversary Show
Thou / Tony Conrad / Sunn O))) @ Knitting Factory; New York, NY
It was in eager, nerve-tingling anticipation that I approached SunnO)))’s first New York appearance in roughly two years. A special four date scuttlebutt (two shows on the East Coast, two on the West) would see the band without a new album to promote, instead celebrating the ten year anniversary of the now legendary Grimm Robe Demos, their first recorded output. Like that demo, the initial testament to their unending down-tuned drone worship, their performance at the Knit was filled with intestine-churning glory. Though more recent SunnO))) live shows have hosted up to seven members on stage, they began with just two robed specters, Southern Lord label-head Greg Anderson and the inimitable Steven O’Malley (KTL, Burning Witch). That’s how it would also be this night, and in the end, less was indeed more.
I entered the club and Baton Rouge natives Thou were on stage. Their website explicitly pleads “Stop Comparing Us to Eyehategod,” and I would’ve, had I not read that. Their metallic sludge-core conjured other doom and gloomers like Cavity and Buzzoven, and though their sound was in a lot of ways familiar, they had a certain knack for crossing genres, mixing in flourishes of psychedelic black-metal of the Nachtmystium sort, while never taking the edge off their particularly misanthropic metal-core. Their singer spewed forth vile with throat lacerating vocals, condemning life in all its horrid splendor. He seemed very angry, in that jaded suburbanite hardcore kind of way, and muttered something before the last song about how life was pointless. Their myspace page also displays teenage angst edicts like “Go outside and burn the world to the ground” and "Give up on life as a bad mistake." Bravo boys. Also, they were selling patches, something I don’t think I’ve experienced since 1998.
The 68 year old Tony Conrad would take the stage next and was a little more contemporary. I’d seen Tony twice in the past year or so but both times he was accompanied, once by the foxy MV Carbon of Metalux, the other trading bowed barbs with C. Spencer Yeh. Though there were similar elements in all three performances, there was something deeply satisfying about seeing Conrad up there on his own, perilously bowing his violin, looping drones and noodling atonally over them with a piece of string. His resonating drones were reminiscent of his work with Lamonte Young and John Cale in the old Theater of Eternal Music days, but it was his economic shtick that really stole the show. In an act that is still confounding me, Tony actually managed to bow -- and get some pretty good sounds -- out of a tightly clamped 50 dollar bill while offering some thoughts on the current economic crisis; “Wall Street’s not too far from here” he grunted like a pirate into the mic; “They’ve been playing with our money.” The financial fluxus piece didn’t end there, as Tony bowed a gold chain while urging people to invest in precious metals. Looping violin goodness, classic authentic minimalism and fluxus foundations all made for an all-out great performance.
I decided to make a move after Conrad’s set to purchase the lusciously beautiful 3xlp Grimm Robe picture disc reissue, which, upon further inspection, glaringly exceeds the dwindling worth of the forty federal reserve notes it took to exchange for it. By that point I had already been boxed out of my original spot, and I noticed the room really starting to fill up. Luckily, I found a gap to the right of the stage, and after waiting for what seemed like one full Paleolithic era for them to come out (I think they were waiting for their industrial fog machine to fill the room), the robed duo finally emerged from the netherworld. I had an excellent vantage point of Greg Anderson, but O'Malley was completely out of my purview. Looking back, I saw the room packed to the gills, but eventually moved more towards the middle in a painfully tight trek. Here I could both performers in all their fist-raising, wine-imbibing glory. Holding their guitars to the heavens and playing one impossibly long note after another, SunnO))) were mightier than the cosmos themselves.
I was convinced there was some divine intervention afoot when O'Malley precariously dangled his guitar on a piece of Styrofoam soundproofing dangling from the ceiling. A collective gasp came from the crowd when he let go, sure it would plummet 10-15 feet to its death, but by God’s hand, it remained there for a good couple of minutes, resonating and hanging high from the ceiling. It was a beautiful thing. The two plodded away for over an hour, each stroke of their guitars endlessly enveloping and extended into a bubbling Chernobyl. Overall, an amazing night from which my body is still vibrating.
CMJ 2008: Day 5
10-25-2008;
{Bloodshot Records Showcase @ Union Pool}
- {Charlie Pickett}
The next "morning," I hauled myself out of bed and headed down Meeker Ave. to the Bloodshot Records showcase at Union Pool. My primary goal was to see Justin Townes Earle, so you can imagine the pleasant shock of walking in and seeing late-80s country/punk legend Charlie Pickett on stage. I quickly scanned the room and noted that this was easily the oldest crowd I'd seen so far at CMJ. In fact, most of the room probably had no idea what CMJ meant, which was kind of refreshing by Day 5. As I found my place in the crowd, my head shot up when Pickett declared "Jack White? Yeah, that guy stole my life." He might be right. Even on his best day, White would have had trouble keeping up with Pickett on Saturday, who is not only twice his age, but much more willing to get behind the roots of his music, which bears the cool edge of The Velvet Underground and the grit of Howlin' Wolf. Despite the older crowd, this was not your grandpaw's country show. Pickett's voice is guttural, and the steel of his guitar strings cut deeply, electrified. "Now right here is some hillbilly logic," he says, launching into a song about how each person in a marriage has got give it up a little to keep the other one happy. Yes, "it." A 60-year-old man talking about "it" in a trendy Brooklyn bar/venue. A Top Ten Moment of CMJ 2008, for sure, and not something we'll be hearing from Jack White anytime soon. Making a comeback after an unjust bout of obscurity, Charlie Pickett has just released Bar Band Americanus: The Best of Charlie Picket And... on Bloodshot.
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- {Justin Townes Earle}
Pickett's band broke down the stage and The White Stripes blared over the venue's PA. Sigh. Justin Townes Earle bears not only the name of his famous father, Steve Earle, but also the name of his father's hero: Townes Van Zandt, and he carries both with a sweet snarl. I'd seen JTE once before on a Rocks Off Concert Cruise, opening for Lucero. My recollection of his set was a bit fuzzy (note: Concert Cruise = Booze Cruise), but I bought his record, The Good Life, and it's been in constant rotation ever since. After I accidentally gossiped about the absence of his bass player/former girlfriend while standing next to his current girlfriend (oops?), Earle took the stage armed only with his acoustic guitar and Cory Younts, who heads up harmonica and mandolin duties. Like the last time I saw him, Earle ensures the mics are turned up so high he barely has to get near his in order for his voice to ricochet around the small room. Although he's got the swagger down, Earle manages to appear humble, even as his guaranteed-not-to-crack voice rips the cheatin' ladies of his past to shreds. "This goes out to what's her name, wherever she is ..." A few couples cut a rug on the sides of the stage, which seems entirely natural given the ambiance Earle gives to the dimly-lit mini-ballroom. Quite simply, Justin Townes Earle plays country music the way it deserves to be played -- without gimmicks. And between you and me, I pretty much lost my shit when he covered "Can't Hardly Wait" by The Replacements, rare in his sets these days. Since I love y'all so very much, there's a video below. The Good Life is out now on Bloodshot Records.
After a delicious dinner from the Union Pool taco truck, I put up my umbrella in the downpour that had suddenly decided to grace our fair city and sprinted towards the L train to go into Manhattan for a couple more showcases.
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{Merge Records Showcase @ The Mercury Lounge}
I returned to The Mercury Lounge (because I love it, don'tcha know) to catch some of the Merge Records showcase and promptly bumped into my buddy Christine Tadler and her boyfriend Matt LeMay (of Brooklyn-based Get Him Eat Him). I soon deducted that Christine would be playing bass in her first live show later in the evening with The Capstan Shafts for the Rainbow Quartz showcase. I announced that I'd be in attendance, much to her chagrin. Heh heh heh.
- {Wye Oak}
I made it onto the floor in time for Wye Oak, whose MySpace headline proclaims, "we don't play acoustic music." They're from Baltimore and quite proud -- when an audience member yelled, "Charm City represent!" singer/guitarist Jenn Wasner smiled and responded, "Holla!" Wasner was clearly the boss, leading the two-piece with her alto voice and overpowering electric guitar (can I get a wah wah pedal?), but drummer/keyboardist Andy Stack is anything but second fiddle. For a while, it seemed like every up-and-coming band was determined to cram as many members on stage as possible, but the trend seems to be going the other way now; this was not the first group I saw at CMJ that made maximum use of merely two members. Wye Oak remind me of a time when indie rock wasn't exactly cool... of course, a young pup like me was still cutting my teeth on that "pop culture" thing, but I know enough of my shit to understand that indie rock was at one point characterized by its lack of frills. Wye Oak hearken these times, and I found myself wishing I could sit on a stool with a big mug of coffee. No finger-snap clapping, though. They're touring with Dr. Dog in Europe, which makes me jealous of everyone across the pond, and their album is called If Children, available from Merge.
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- {Portastatic}
Portastatic is essentially Mac MacCaughan, lead singer of a little band called Superchunk, backed by keys and the one and only Margaret White on violin. After gracious praise of the bands preceding him -- "I don't know how you guys do it!" -- MacCaughan flies headlong into an acoustic assault, his voice pleasantly grating, with an extra bit of finesse, like a little secret part of him would love to be a pop singer. Still, no Justin Timberlake would unleash lyrics like, "A spider you can't catch/ A cunning rusty latch." This couplet repeated itself in my brain for the remainder of the evening, and I found myself mumbling it as I speedwalked through the cold night air. Probably because it's absolutely perfect. MacCaughan asked for some volunteers to play percussion, and peer pressure dictated that a starstruck badge-wearer and Matt (remember him?) get on stage and do their duty. Check out the video below. Some Small History came out this year on Merge.
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CMJ 2008: Day 4
10-24-2008;
{La Di Da Di Rock Da Party @ Whisk and Ladle}
Friday evening didn't go off quite as planned. Long story short: I put on a different hat and played cello for Quitzow, along with fellow Young Love-r Setting Sun, at the La Di Da Di Rock Da Party in Brooklyn. Luckily, that meant I was privy to two of the most impressive and intimate live sets I saw all week. And then we all ate homemade pumpkin pie.
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- {The Loom}
The Loom reside in Brooklyn, and I'd like to take a moment to thank them for securing Friday night's performance space, a beautiful Williamsburg loft belonging to their friends who often host dinner parties, but never concerts! None of the residents seemed disturbed, though... and really, who would be upset to come home and find a pack of ex-band geeks making beautiful noise in the living room? My notebook contains written observations like "OBOE! CLARINET! LUTE! LAP STEEL" and not much else, because I spent most of the set clapping and singing along with the gang-chorus vocal lines. Lead singer John Fanning reeled out lyrics in a folky staccato, but made plenty of room for the five (!) other players to join him in elaborate harmony. It's pretty impossible to fake the French horn, and Lis Rubard set an example for all you punks out there who think it looks easy, at times leading the entire crew with its gentle tenor. The sheer volume of instruments employed by The Loom is hard to describe without listing every single one, so just peep this video and trust me. These guys don't fuck around.
The Loom's self-released EP is called At Last Light.
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- {Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson}
Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and his crew rolled in sometime during The Loom's set, looking completely dialed-in and exhausted. I heard some people murmuring about how this would be their third show of the day, so no small wonder there! In a way, though, it made his set that much more poignant, as it was clear he and his band were running exclusively on bourbon and endorphins. His voice had a ragged tear to it (more than usual), but he and his band put every last drop of their remaining energy into this living room set. If the upstairs neighbors hadn't been awake before, Robinson's boot stomps had them listening through their floors for sure. His story is widely circulated now... about how he pulled himself out of a druggy, messed-up life in Coney Island after moving there from Oregon and started writing songs instead. The sad edge is still very much present in his lyrics, dropping F-bombs you don't expect in the folky setting.
I felt genuinely lucky to see him play in such a quiet, undisturbed space. Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson worked on his full-length album, Buriedfed, for two years, with the help of Grizzly Bear and TV On The Radio members. It's out now on Say Hey.
The Notwist
Webster Hall; New York, NY
As irrelevant as the remaining Beatles members seem these days, Paul and Ringo can take consolation in the fact that the ideal rock ‘n’ roll career is still based on the mold they created: release some great disposable pop records, then move closer and closer towards more serious “mature” music with each successive record. This idea of artistic development is becoming increasingly less feasible by the day, but when a band manages to follow this path successfully, it still usually works. The Notwist are the prime German indie world example of a band that has followed this career arc, moving from throwaway quasi grunge metal beginnings, to sort of 90s indie rock, to sort of dance pop, to full-on electro acoustic pop rock maturity over the course of a decade plus.
Taking this arc as a model, and 2002’s Neon Golden as the consensus choice for their artistic peak, this year’s follow up, The Devil, You + Me, should either be the record where The Notwist test the limits of experimentation and produce an incomprehensible dud, the record where they get sentimental and show their age, or the record where they try to sound like they did on their previous record and lose their creative momentum. Happily, The Notwist avoid falling into the trap of the first category, but for good or ill, The Devil, You + Me can’t avoid sounding like a safer, gentler version of Neon Golden.
In terms of a live show, it’s much more difficult to say how a band like The Notwist “should” age. The Beatles were done with live performance by the time they got serious, so there’s no model here. Good thing. The Notwist are an uncommonly great live band -- this show proved that, even when their “mature” recordings sound slightly muted or conservative, they bring out serious fire from them in a live setting. On record, their best songs get by on subtlety, lyrical delicacy, and intricate production. Live, their least subtle songs are their best, and the band’s best efforts lose the details of a song in order to benefit the performance as a whole. Every boring indie rock band out there (and The Notwist, with The Devil, You + Me are hanging on the precipice here) should take note of this approach.
Here’s an example of how this works: as many outstanding songs as Neon Golden contains, and as wonderfully as the band performs them live, it’s always “This Room” that tears the roof off a show. The recorded version of the song thrives on its verses that build tension through electronic cacophony played over the fatalistic message, “We will never, will never leave this room,” and give way to instrumental sections that are somehow just as tense and brooding. At Webster Hall, the instrumental sections became hugely cathartic passages, with singer/guitarist Markus Acher alternating between primal strumming of a single chord and utilizing his signature maneuver of guitar violence: smashing the strings into the pickups with his hand to produce a percussive, mechanical, and disquieting punctuation. And just when you thought they’d reached their peak of intensity, the band effortlessly pushed the dynamic from kill to obliterate, only to gracefully come back down and deliver another verse. It’s a simple variation on the classic Pixies “soft-loud-soft” trick, but one that was masterfully played.
Thankfully, the band is able to pull similar tricks with much of its new material. Besides “Boneless,” which lacked any real sense of purpose, all of the Devil, You + Me tracks in the set sounded perfectly at home alongside the more time-tested Neon Golden favorites. “Where In This World” and “Gravity,” in particular, reached levels of noisy grace equaling “This Room” and “Pick Up the Phone.”
As surprisingly good as the newer tracks were, the Neon Golden tracks were still the highlights. “Neon Golden” had a beautifully meditative quality to it, even when tech wiz Martin Gretschmann and drummer Andi Haberl took the opportunity offered by a freeform middle section to turn it into something akin to a Depeche Mode song. On “Pilot,” the band delved into the dub tendencies that are only hinted at on the recorded version of the track and did so while somehow avoiding coming off as over-reaching central European dilettantes.
Age has certainly not slowed down The Notwist at all. Even though they concentrated on their more downbeat tracks as the set wore on, they should still be commended for indulging a very appreciative crowd with two encores, bringing the set time close to the two-hour mark. The appearance of quieter material was by no means a bad thing, and the softer ending to the show was arguably even more affecting than the show’s louder, more frantic episodes. “Consequence,” with which they opened their final encore, received possibly the warmest welcome from the crowd of any song in the set, underscoring the fact that, as good as The Notwist are at staging musical and lyrical tension, they are most appreciated when they can alleviate tension rather than create it. “Gone, Gone, Gone,” “The Devil, You + Me,” and “Sleep” were also as welcome in the set as anything else, and along with the Wii controllers Gretschmann used throughout the show to control the band’s signature fuzzed-out loops, they lent a sense of levity to a night which could easily have become too dour or too serious.
