Lykke Li / Friendly Fires
The Doug Fir; Portland, OR
I didn’t have particularly high expectations for Lykke Li and Friendly Fires’ show at Portland, Oregon’s The Doug Fir. Li’s debut Youth Novel has some great tracks, but I wasn’t bowled over by it as a whole, and while Friendly Fires’ self-titled debut had potential to translate to a live setting, I wasn't overly excited to see them. Little did I know that this would be, without a doubt, one of the best shows I’ve attended in the past year.
Friendly Fires' feisty electro-funk came to life on stage. Dressed in a smartly fitted white-collared shirt with black pants, singer Ed Macfarlane wasted no time in displaying his unrefined, ineffable dance moves. Suffice to say, the pelvic thrusts began immediately, propelling him off the stage and into the crowd. At first, the audience stared in shock, “Who does this guy think he is?” people thought. “Does he have a single ounce of self-consciousness?” Turns out he doesn’t, and it was badass. Soon, a squadron of dancing and screaming females congregated at the front of the stage.
The musical chops were there to backup the dance moves. With its catchy nod to Stevie Wonder, drummer Jack Savidge’s arms flying like a one-man drum circle, and bassist Rob Lee’s indefatigable cowbell worship, “In The Hospital” got the crowd moving. Meanwhile, “Strobe” allowed FF to halt the funk for a moment and indulge in a ballad rounded out by Joshua Tree-esque atmospheric guitar and a bubbling synth sample. The veins in Macfarlane’s neck bulged as he lifted a fist to the ceiling, threw back his head, and shouted the chorus. It was a little much, but this band is nothing if not excessive, and such heavy-handed strokes fit the bill.
Soon after Friendly Fires' set, the club filled to maximum capacity. A musician walked on stage, picked up an acoustic guitar, and began to play the two notes that make up Lykke Li’s “Dance Dance Dance.” Next, a drummer and keyboardist joined and commenced to pound along and lay down a groove. Finally, Lykke Li, wearing a billowing black dress, walked to the mic and began singing as the packed crowd erupted into cheers. I’d never particularly liked that song until that very moment. Pared down to its live essentials, even barer than Björn Yttling and Lasse Mârtén’s minimalist production, her songs gained a robustness that's lacking on Youth Novel.
“Hanging High” took on a doo-wop timelessness, as Li’s pained vocals filled every corner of The Doug Fir. Soon after, Li and her band launched into a cover of Wendy Rene’s soul classic “After Laughter (Come Tears).” Hearing her expressive soprano rise above the harmonies of the band was haunting and impressive. “Little Bit” was predictably crowd-pleasing, while an adorable and skillfully executed cover of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It” came out of nowhere near the end of the set and brought the audience to a zenith of excitement.
Throughout the performance, Li expressed the melancholy themes of her album while simultaneously maintaining a buoyant, even playful bearing, shaking her hips and fueling the audience to dance and move passionately to the music. Not sure how she balanced it all, but the performance left me with a smile that I couldn’t force off my face if I tried.
Herman Dune / Jolie Holland
Lakeshore Theater; Chicago, IL
In the interest of full disclosure, I wasn't supposed to write this review. A friend of mine wanted to write for TMT, so I flexed my (near-negligible) muscle and got us on the list for the October 27 Jolie Holland show at Lakeshore Theater. He was supposed to write it up, and I would send it to my editor, and we could all swing up into the saddle and ride off into the sunset. As of this date, however, he has not written up the show, so I have decided to soldier on and write something.
The Lakeshore Theater is most often a comedy club, and initially the advantages of such a venue were obvious: the sound was good, booze was easily accessible, and everyone could comfortably see the musicians without having to touch each other. After awhile, though, it just seemed kind of detached. There was no energy moving between the audience and performers. People felt free to chat a little.
This was especially a problem during Herman Dune's set. The band is touring as a duo, with David-Ivar handling guitar and lead vocals and Néman doing drums/bongos and backing vocals. They looked and sounded excellent up there, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they were a little intimidated by the silent, seated audience. David told a little story about being confused as to why Chicago music stores do not have special sections set aside for Chuck Berry, and between the adorable accents and the goofy dancing, the audience livened up considerably. Almost all of the songs played were from their latest release, Next Year In Zion, but the older songs held up remarkably well considering the stripped-down arrangement. For a treat of a last song, they invited Rachel Blumberg up to play bongos. A++++ would ogle Frenchmen with excellent facial hair again.
Admittedly, I am almost totally unfamiliar with most of Jolie Holland's music, including her latest record, Living & the Dead. (My failure of a friend was supposed to keep a setlist. He did not.) Holland's records have always lulled me into a sort of alt-jazz-folk stupor, and while the addition of a bassist, guitarist, and drummer kept things varied in tempo and dynamics, I still had trouble staying engaged. She has a wonderful quality to her voice; it's just not my thing. I was busy all day. It was a 10 o'clock show that didn't start till 10:30, so she didn't go on till almost midnight. I can give you any number of excuses, but no real solid information about Jolie Holland & Co's performance. It was acceptable. The audience seemed into it. If you like her records, you should probably catch a show.
Crystal Castles
Neumo's; Seattle, WA
If there's still a distinction between electronic dance music and rock ‘n’ roll, it’s fading fast. As synths mingle with, or replace, guitars and the traditional four-piece gets pared down to the two-piece or one-piece, an unfortunate side-effect has emerged: an epidemic of poor showmanship. Luckily, Crystal Castles seemed determined to buck this trend.
Opening act David Wolf, however, epitomized these boring performances. The Tacoma, WA-based solo act slowly rocked back and forth behind his computer, staring at the monitor. Every couple of minutes he took a sip of water, then gently placed the bottle back down on the table next to his computer. Afterward, Tempe, Arizona’s Lymbyc System crafted a mesmerizing mix of drums and echo-laden clavinet that was by turns tranquil and hugely magnificent. The clavinet’s keyboard/electric guitar hybrid tone sounded incredible as Jared Bell allowed the volume to ebb and swell alongside his brother Mike Bell’s superb drumming.
Crystal Castles soon took the stage with a burst of verve that didn’t let up for an instant of their 45-minute set. The moment their waves of 8-bit melody flowed through the speakers, the audience convulsed in a mass of movement closer to a riot than a rave. There were no guitarists in sight, no punk rock beats, yet the area in front of the stage transformed into a mass of hip teenagers jumping and pushing each other. Unrelenting strobe lights provided the only illumination of the stage and transformed Alice Glass into a blur of motion with jet-black hair, a black t-shirt, and raccoon-like eye shadow.
Ethan Kath didn’t add much to the performance; he stood stationary behind his electronics in his signature black hoodie. He kept the instrumental tracks faithful to the recordings and didn’t interact with the crowd. No problem though, Glass was the star of the show, as she writhed and shrieked demonically in front of a large banner of their infamous mangled Madonna image, her frenetic antics feeding the enthusiasm of the crowd-surfing audience in front of her. The stage didn’t seem to have enough space to contain her, as she kept hurling herself into the arms of the crowd. At one point, she wrapped the microphone around her neck and stared forlornly at the audience. (I think it was supposed to be edgy.)
Still, the performance was a refreshing injection of energy and engagement. While I would have preferred a crowd of dancers rather than the quasi-mosh pit, maybe I’m just getting old. In any case, it was a captivating, frenzied spectacle -- can't argue with that.
Baltimore Round Robin: Eyes Night
(Le) Poisson Rouge; New York, NY
Baltimore has invaded NYC. Its musicians are hovering on the sidewalk of Bleecker Street, looking haggard after two weeks on the road. What do they need? Food? Sleep? Vitamins? Vegetable oil as alternative fuel? All of the above, it seems, to assure that they can make it back to Charm City. But they can’t hit the road just quite yet. They’ve got to deliver not one, two, or three more shows, but a whopping four shows over the course of two nights. Daunting, maybe, but they are in it together -- all 60 of them.
In the depths of (Le) Poisson Rouge, projectors are already casting rainbow patterns onto eager faces and the surrounding arsenal of instruments. This is the Round Robin's Eyes Night showcase (Feet Night follows the next day), and, appropriately, the setup looks more like a collective warehouse space than a Greenwich Village nightclub.
After the Baltimoreans join hands to surround the crowd and lead a collective hum, they take turns hopping on the many makeshift stages to showcase their sounds: Teeth Mountain brings droning strings and tribal beats; Lexie Mountain Boys sway and chant out their one-of-a-kind, elaborately costumed performance pieces; Nautical Almanac, visible only as silhouettes behind a backlit sheet, emits a variety of esoteric noise; Jana Hunter and Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez carry the pensive, but not cliché, singer-songwriter banner; and, finally, Beach House places an emphatic period on each Round Robin rotation with their dramatic and encompassing sound.
While the more recognizable names meet expectations, it’s the lesser-exposed “side show” acts that make the night unique and engaging. The Creepers and Santa Dads' quirky tunes and mannerisms inspire smiles in the crowd, while Blue Leader, decked out in a Cyclops superhero costume, gives video-accompanied philosophical monologues on first-person shooters and other games. After “preparing” the audience with a mantra of “Homer Simpson, Bart Simpson, Lisa Simpson, Marge Simpson, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie,” the comical Showbeast presents a video that comes across like a tripped-out Jim Henson skit.
As the Round Robin's night one ends, ringleader Dan Deacon teeters on stage, slightly sloshed, to introduce the participants of Eyes Night and to remind the crowd to come back the following day, when he and more of his traveling troupe will present the more fuel-injected Feet Night. As the lights come on, security rushes people up the venue’s stairs, making way for the night’s next show and bringing this Exploding Plastic Inevitable-esque road show one step closer to home.
Deerhoof / Fertile Crescent / Experimental Dental School
40 Watt Club; Athens, GA
Walking into the 40 Watt on Halloween amid throngs of blood-plastered faces and ingeniously-engineered DIY costumes, I immediately recognized that, whether I liked it or not, I would be judging Deerhoof’s performance largely on their collective Halloween spirit and attention to costume. So when the band strolled out in mammoth, teetering carnivorous cat masks, excepting drummer Greg Saunier as the lone rodent in a mouse costume that was quickly drenched in sweat, the night’s success was effectively ensured.
Though to be fair, I should admit that I am the hugest of Deerhoof nerds, and given that this was to be my very first ‘Hoof show, I was sufficiently geeked-out. The band could do no wrong in my adoring eyes. This unadulterated enthusiasm extended even to their energetic opener “Basketball Get Your Groove Back” -- a song that I consider the weakest on the otherwise untouchable Offend Maggie. A large part of the band’s success this night in translating their recordings into powerful performances can be attributed to their new guitarist, Ed Rodriguez, whose zeal was shown with his enormous, continual grin, peeking out from under his ridiculously-oversized plush white tiger mask.
Only a few songs into the set, the excitement broke into fever pitch -- “Holy Night Fever” pitch I should say, heh heh, an obvious crowd favorite -- when Satomi broke out the silly string. Pretty wild Halloween show, right? By all accounts, Deerhoof is a pretty weird band, and given the artsy, almost abstruse experimental nature of their albums, it’s easy to forget how downright funky and straight-ahead rockin’ ol Deerhoof can be. Once again, the added guitar-power of Ed Rodriguez, not to mention the sheer insanity of Greg Saunier’s drum skills, brought out the rock, as the band stuck to songs that seemed best suited to live performance, like “Twin Killers,” “Wrong Time Capsule,” and “Spirit Ditties of No Tone” off The Runners Four.
“Milk Man” closed the show, and by this time, a sizable contingent of drunken, costumed assholes were trying their best to ruin the almost perfect show by creating an egregiously rowdy mosh pit directly to my left. Is it just me or is a Deerhoof show not the kind of place you expect to get elbowed in the face? However, John Dieterich, with a lion’s head slung behind his own like a fuzzy turtle shell hat, revived the night’s overwhelming sense of pure Deerhoof delight, when he stopped to take pictures of everyone’s costumes. Earlier, Greg had stopped the show to mention how excited he was by everyone’s costumes, and John’s aftershow photos only reinforced the feeling that Deerhoof's awesome performance is directly related to how much they care about what they do.
Against Me! / Ted Leo + The Pharmacists / Future of the Left
Webster Hall; New York, NY
In the last 5 years, we’ve seen Death Cab for Cutie become a household name; we’ve seen “emo” become a term that people, who weren’t alive when “Friday I’m In Love” came out, apparently know enough about to debate its meaning on their blogs; and bands like The Arcade Fire have seen enough money to seriously call into question the relevance of independent rock ‘n’ roll in 2008.
But thankfully, providence has blessed our wearied ears with a tour lineup of Future of the Left, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and Against Me! True, five years have changed these bands as much as anyone else. Mclusky may have broken up and partially reformed as Future of the Left; Ted Leo may have embraced ska and lost his longtime bassist Dave Lerner; and Against Me! may have become a band that you can actually hear on mainstream radio, but for a second at least, this lineup offers a chance to think back on a simpler time: a time when the indie world was riding high on such masterpieces as Mclusky’s Do Dallas (2002), Ted Leo’s The Tyranny of Distance (2001), and Against Me!’s Reinventing Axl Rose (2002).
Future of the Left, with a familiar three-piece lineup and the same lyrical preoccupations and rhythmic immediacy, sounds enough like vintage Mclusky to hold up their side of the bargain in this nostaligic delusion. Following through on the promise of 2007’s Curses, they kicked the ass of an unsuspecting crowd for a full 30 minutes. Songs from Curses (“adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood,” “Small Bones, Small Bodies,” “Manchasm,” and others) took on a new life in the live setting, as the surprisingly intricate vocal interplay between bassist Kelson Mathias and guitarist Andy “Falco” Falkous benefited from the lack of studio glossiness, coming through much more clearly and effectively. The set also included three new songs, including “A Hope That House Built,” and an extended multipart freakout that closed the set with a very un-Mclusky level of psychedelic instrumental abandon.
Perhaps even more entertaining, though, was their witty and crass onstage banter. Falkous’s lyrics, which promote violence and love as two sides of the same coin, may have been too often buried by less-than-stellar mixing, but even if you couldn’t make out his entreaty, from “Small Bones, Small Bodies,” to, “grow into your body happily,” Mathias’ attempt to affably lead the crowd in a cheer dedicated to Leo and Against Me! should have gotten across the band’s perhaps too-often buried sympathetic side. The violence half of the coin, was, of course, covered by Mathias threatening to karate kick a less adoring member of the crowd through the wall into “the venue next door”.
Ted Leo, for his part, opened with faithfully stirring renditions of Tyranny of Distance’s “Timorous Me” and followed it with “Where Have All the Rude Boy’s Gone” from 2003’s Hearts of Oak, giving the momentary impression that maybe nothing had changed at all in the last five years. Of course, he then shattered the illusion by launching into more recent material from Shake the Sheets and Living With the Living. While the newer material, which made up the entirety of the rest of the set, may have lacked the effortless joy of the first two songs, at no point did the show lose a sense of purpose, and Leo, despite his apparent laryngitis, maintained the same level of positive intensity that has become something of a trademark for him. If anything, the fact that Leo was losing his voice and the manner in which he unceremoniously dispatched each tune -- businesslike, but not in a bad way -- supported his claim to the title of hardest working man in independent rock ‘n’ roll.
But Against Me! are the real success story on this bill, having come a long way since Axl Rose. They’ve built a rabid teenage fanbase, who showed up in droves for this show. If you weren’t an under-21 Against Me! freak, you were in the minority here, and that made for a great concert-going experience in a few notable ways. For one, apparently the rule that says you can’t wear a band’s t-shirt to a concert where they’re performing doesn’t apply to Against Me!’s fans. Not only was the crowd lousy with 18-year-old kids wearing all manner of Against Me! apparel -- much of it identical to the items available at the merch table and seemingly very new -- but this seemed like a perfectly natural and reasonable expression of appreciation for the band. Depressing as it is to watch fans of a band far past their prime stroll around outdoor amphitheaters, holding aluminum light beer bottles and wearing the shirt they bought at last year’s tour, emblazoned with the hideous artwork from last years cash-in comeback album, it almost warms the heart to see a young crowd this large show enough devotion to a band this not-shitty to not only stencil the band’s name onto the back of a denim jacket, but to wear such a jacket to the band’s concert and, what’s more, show up three hours before the band even goes on. This sort of positive energy created by younger, more dedicated, and less grizzled fans is only one of the many reasons that all-ages shows -- this one was 16+, but felt all-ages enough -- should be the rule rather than exception in live music.
Unfortunately, the show itself couldn’t live up to the level of excitement stoked by the fan’s expectations. The band performed around a dozen songs, heavily leaning on material from last year’s New Wave, sounding very similar to the versions you’d find on an Against Me! record. The mix was good, the performances were tight, but everything about the music worked towards the impression that what was going on wasn’t much different than listening to the album. Visually, while a large projection of the awesome tiger face from the New Wave artwork was a nice touch, the band did little to differentiate the experience from that of watching one of their music videos on YouTube.
Before this gets too negative, though, let’s get it straight that the point of an Against Me! show, as borne out by the both their performance and the reaction of their fans, isn’t to present a new experience, to expand upon musical ideas laid down in the band’s recordings, or to recontextualize the band’s music. Against Me!’s fans want to hear the songs they know and love, played by the band that they know and love, the way that they know and love. And while these songs are being played, they want to be able to sing along with their friends, dance and brush up against each other, jump up on the stage and crowd surf, or if they’re not brave enough, get their crowd surf kicks vicariously from their fellow fans.
Against Me! delivered this experience in spades. Their songs are perfectly vague (a more brilliantly soothing and meaningless lyric than “Stop/Take some time to think/ Figure out what’s important to you” may never have been written); their music overlooks the conventions of pop punk just enough to feel slightly threatening without actually being threatening, and even the way they look on stage is the precisely prescribed form of anonymous. Tattooed, short hair, black shirts (or no shirts), they visually embody hardcore’s “I’m no more important than you” ethos, albeit while playing songs that, like all good-not-great pop music are unlikely to call anyone’s personal beliefs into question and are fun to sing along with.
Teenage music is often described as angry and rebellious, but, the music that really speaks to the teenage experience is more often closer to Against Me!’s brand of almost pop, almost punk: confrontational at first glance, but essentially amorphous and thus adaptable to the confused and ever-changing concerns of adolescent and post-adolescent life. Against Me!’s teenage fanbase identifies with the band, not necessarily because of who the band is or what they say, but because their image and message is malleable enough that anyone can build an earnest personal connection to it. Whatever the reason, though, the crowd’s devotion was never in question: this show included perhaps the most sincere stage diving I have ever witnessed.
As strong as the urge to relive 2002 might be, the real thrill of this show came from rekindling an adolescent excitement not from remembering that first Ted Leo show you saw where he tore up “The Great Communicator” at the end, but from watching the Against Me! kids go crazy to music that is definitively theirs. In 2002, this still would have been a 16+ show and these kids wouldn’t have gotten in, so why not embrace 2008?
