How did our borough fall off the map so quickly? Maybe it’s ending was prophesied from the start, but it was just two years ago when Dirty Projectors, LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collecive, Vampire Weekend and Grizzly Bear could all be found releasing/promoting new records that people actually thought stood out. 

Maybe it’s too soon for this kind of criticism, but fuck it… just two years later, James Murphy is only part-time DJ’ing and Dave Longstreth is nowhere to be seen. Even MGMT’s ‘Congratulations’ was quickly dismissed by pretty much everyone. Is this what happens to great scenes after they’ve captured the attention of too many desperate scene-makers?

I don’t pretend to know how this works. I do know that the great band Caveman can’t carry this whole town on their backs… so this is my short appeal for the kind of anal excellence Dave Longstreth and Ezra Koenig once gave us to all the would-be Todd P’s out there. Get to work!!! Thank you.

— Mike

agrammar:

Discussed over here —

in a few brief paragraphs.

Negativity!

A post I originally submitted for awesome beat blog bowery boogie that ended up both infuriating performer Emily Greene, and later sorta endeared us to one another… in a Jewish nuttiness sorta way: 

Emily Greene celebrated her birthday Friday night at the Rockwood Music Hall Stage 2.  Not sure if this is how she celebrates the aging process every year, but we’re grateful for the invitation to the party this time around. Two reasons in particular: The show was free (always a bonus…thank you, Rockwood!), and second, this might have been one of the most diverse set lists we’ve seen since our friend’s crappy wedding band played last month. (if we hear electric slide one more time…)

Emily is not one to be pinned down. Throwing her weight around all the backcorners of the rock n’ roll/torch song catalog, Greene and her band of doods made sure everyone got something they wanted. One minute, she was covering the Cars “Just What I needed,” the next… Cinderella’s “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” then back again to the soul crooners we know well from her first record. At times, this 31 flavors approach to set construction came across like DJ’ing, vacillating between different genres and vocal styles, trying to match the music up with the shifting mood of the crowd…or maybe just the shifting moods of Emily. But then… it’s her party, and she’ll cry/scream/croon if she wants to.

Most exciting were the teasers she gave for her new LP slated for release after we breeze through the summer. “Oceans and Waves” placed a musical backdrop against the mood-setting lights she strung across the stage, but “How Low?” (below) was the real standout. Filled with mountains and valleys, she displayed her enormous range here in a much more sensitive and personal spirit than anything we’d heard from her first record.

Love the piano, too. Like our other favorite local diva Shenandoah Ableman, something about this instrument lends the proper weight to her smokey alto, and she really shined once locked into that groove.

Ms. Greene is an artist in transition. It’s rare that we’ve experienced a singer/songwriter in the act of crossing the border from the safer territory of tried-and-true soul croon to the kind of genre-hopping rock theatrics we have to look forward to in the fall. There’s a lot ahead for you Emily… blow out your candles and make a wish hurry up and give us a new record!

Some thoughts. I’ve loved Nitsuh Abebe for some time. Ever since he gave Village Voice columnist Jessica Hopper the time of day in fact. He’s always given us a much more nuanced look at where we are in music than many of the academics who claim to study this.

His latest Pitchfork post discusses music fans placing style over substance. Lady Gaga is taking the easy way out. Celebrating self-empowerment for it’s own sake, putting it to work as a branding tool and dismissing the details under the packaging.

He brings up a solid point. I found it interesting that his article discusses Gaga (and just a little… Odd Future) without mentioning their music in much detail. And maybe that was the point of the piece. Her music isn’t as important as the posture it perpetuates. She encourages her fans to follow their own voice… but only so much. If she went further and actually encouraged conversation about what kind of a voice she’s interested in hearing, this would bog things down a bit too much and her ‘little monsters’ might segment into different rallying points, pulling the center of gravity away from Gaga. I make this sound like a marketing move, but it also describes the function of the music itself.

Abebe’s article touches on a larger need of our generation to experience ‘heedlessness’ without agenda, without the responsibilities of verbal commitment. This isn’t the equivalent of gen x’ers’ rejection of ladder-climbing careers and casual interest in alternative lifestyle. It more describes a goal to absolve ourselves from the traps of fractured conversations we constantly find ourselves bogged down in online. This is why Gaga’s able to cross over so many segments… she’s all inclusive and somehow still tagged as controversial without worrying over any of the fussy details.

The man asked a question at the end of his piece that deserves an answer: “what about the strange and complicated part where we figure out what that (how we should live) is?” Gaga’s music (like L’il Jon and The Black Eyed Peas) is a rejection of talking points like these, in favor of a bland feeling of togetherness and self-empowerment. Once we get into the details… the party’s over. : (

Thanks Nitsuh… how about a question for you. What should I listen to then???

somesongsconsidered:

“You Are Invited” – The Dismemberment Plan 
(Words/music: The Dismemberment Plan, available on Emergency & I, DeSoto 1999 / Barsuk 2011) 

Part 2 of 2: “No date, no place, no time, no RSVP” 

I usually think about the contrasting sections in this song. Specifically, I think of the way the live band ambushes the programmed beat during the second chorus, only to recede back to the sequencer for the next verse. Recently, I started paying closer attention to the strange sounds that creep in during the end of the second verse. They happen right around the point the narrator goes to the party held by his “ex-thing,” and they’re mixed beneath the fast clicking that runs throughout the entire second beat. Maybe it’s from knowing that the full band waits ready to bust through the chorus, or maybe it’s from the type of tension I’d feel if I went to a party at my ex’s house, but these sounds made the rest of the verse feel nervous. This leads into the cathartic blast of guitar and drums in the verse, but also the relief in the narrative when Ex-Thing repeats the welcoming advice inscribed in the invitation. 

It’s this combination of social awkwardness followed by an immediate, almost superhuman transformation that made me think of Scott Pilgrim, the comics (and movie) about a twenty-something slacker who simultaneously fights video game-style villains and the inner conflicts that plague people in their teens and early twenties. It started with this image of a party combined with an anime-like “power up” triggered by this music, but then the message of optimism and proactivity in the song’s invitation struck me as the kind of thing Scott Pilgrim needed to hear. If nothing else, it was the kind of thing I needed to hear, whether from another human being or even just a random piece of mail, when I went through the mix of heartbreak and uncertainty and parylyzing indecision that Scott Pilgrim encountered in the comics. It’s still nice to hear and even better, as the song’s narrator learns in the final verse, to pass on to those who need it more than you do. 

More on The Dismemberment Plan: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

I just wrote something for the Deli about Yvette’s new one. The record has this ineffable, physical energy that brings it to life. You throw it on, and feel like maybe this is a live recording of some spontaneous idea. It sounds like Yvette’s members got Reason and their MacBooks together in the same room as their floor toms and got all real with that shit. 

But you know what it also makes me think of. These guys may be acting out a ritual. This is the sort of music that tells a story for a community as a completely direct experience. A lot of dance music works this way too, but dance music has been chopped and sliced up into so many sub-genres and sub-sub-genres that its rules strictly codify its context to its audience way ahead of a given performance.

Not so with Yvette. Here’s two musicians using whatever resources they have available (laptops, floor toms, liberal amounts of reverb) to create a moment of shared experience… no referencing, no posturing, no automatic audience defined at all. This music acts as its own purpose, it’s own set of instructions. This is what Animal Collective have been doing for years… and minimalism before them (I’m thinking of you LaMonte Young, yr awesome), but that’s for another ramble. 

Anyways, it got me thinking. A lot of our generation’s most interesting artists seem to be moving toward an ecstatic experience in their music, away from using song shapes as a platform to broadcast ‘us v. them’ power struggles like the gen x’ers did last century. Today, bands have a much greater interest in utilizing their space instead as voice for a kind of ‘in-the-moment’ experience. Less important is its role in self-expression. Instead, this is simple, visceral stuff. 

Maybe this happened before in pop music. Probs worth a look. In my memory, I can’t think of many artists before the past ten years that would step so boldly outside of traditional song structure without getting the dreaded ‘art music’ tag branded on them (though Harry Nilsson did write a couple songs with no chord changes). Where only a couple years ago this kind of context-free music would have fallen outside of pop music’s scope, now it seems like the perfect soundtrack for our media-saturated landscapes. 

Soooo… is it possible that bands like AC, tUnE-YarDs, Yeasayer and Yvette are actually staking out a more mainstream position than many of their contemporaries by virtue of their not addressing any particular conversation at all in their music??? That may not be how they would describe things, or maybe it’s just too soon to describe exactly what kind of conversation they’re having at all. That remains to be seen. For now, it’s just fun to join the tribe. 

Anyways, just some ramblings before I get to see them play next Wednesday at Glasslands.