Live Review: Dirty Projectors 7.19.09

I have to admit, the idea of hearing the Dirty Projectors play a "rock concert" was difficult for me to imagine just a few days ago. Maybe it's that the recent Bitte Orca is a squeaky-clean bit of art-rock that's more art than rock, cut with an Exacto rather than a rusty switchblade. They're clearly listening to Nico Muhly as much as they're paying dues to the Talking Heads.

So I was skeptical of seeing these guys and girls play a JellyNYC Pool Party and not, say, a BAM theater show. Sunday's show on the Williamsburg waterfront was indeed a shorts-and-tees, sun-on-the-pavement, summer banger alright. Openers Magnolia Electric Co. pumped out Mason-Dixon rock with a heavy lean toward A.M. Wilco. The organized dodgeball matches got intense. The drinkers wandered about in their quarantine, then when the Projectors came on they ditched their beers and crossed over to the cordoned-off patch of pavement by the stage.


But from very first notes of the opening song -- a guitar-vocal duet on ballad "Two Doves" between frontman Dave Longstreth and secret-weapon Angel Deradoorian -- the Projectors, well, killed it. And killing it is not an action for artsy, precious finnickers. No sir, this show was built on intense and mathy interplays, wild and staticky bass distortion, four-part harmonies that broke out into primal screams but never devolved.

It was the Projectors' three femme fatales -- particularly the instrument-swapping Deradoorian -- who stole the show. Heaped onto one another on "Cannibal Resource," the three voices may have created one of the thickest walls of sound such a high register has ever heard. And when Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle bounced glitchy "ooh-eeh-ahhs" back and forth at manic speeds on "Remade Horizon," the pitch precision defied even autotune. Blurted-out guitar lines from Longstreth and Amber Coffman on "No Intention" also sounded almost robotic. But the Projectors deep-sixed their own flirtation with binary-code rock with grimy tones on their electrics and vocal tremolos ranging from slight to zealous. When the ladies took center stage on "Stillness Is the Move," it was Coffman's soulful vocal solo that drew the day's most fervent applause.

The Projectors began the set with three tunes from Bitte and rarely deviated from the record after that. They have a right to be partial to an album like this, one that's tight beyond belief but unfurls more uncharted territory with each new listen. It was the reaching into the back catalog, though, namely for "Rise Above" and "Knotty Pine," that turned up the most impressive results. These songs got recastings with twice the cohesion and none of the sags in energy of their recorded versions.

Watching Longstreth cavort across the stage like a maniacal, hunchbacked Jim Carrey, taking in the Battles-go-lightly mathiness of "Temecula Sunrise," hearing crisp African guitar rhythms go up agaisnt fuzz-muddled bass, I realized that it was going to feel almost like cheating to write this review, since anyone with half a wit could find a dozen interesting things to say about music played like this.

Live Review: Ezra Furman and the Harpoons 6.23.09

Calling all New Yorkers. If you are in this city and you haven't found time to hear Ezra Furman and the Harpoons perform, do yourself a favor.

The venerable indie-folkers will wrap up their residency at Piano's on Tuesday, and if they repeat their performance from yesterday night, many smiling faces will be heading for the exit at about 11:05 p.m.

The Harpoons vaulted through an hour-long set that was entirely as manic as Furman's gleeful howls. Even when he promised to play a slow song, that tune ended up being "God Is a Middle-Aged Woman," which in turn ended up being one of the loudest songs of the night, all gritty and pained – and painfully honest – but disarmingly goofy as well. While the guitar got dirtier and the drums got louder, he was gazing at the ceiling as he snarled, "Oh, God! / Won't you just say hello?" It's fair to say that when he was telling it, the sheepish and silly Furman took us places the Vatican – more to the point, your rabbi – never could.

But let's be honest: where the Harpoons' 2007 album, Banging Down the Doors, was a young thinking kid's folk gem, last night's concert was a lesson in the virtues of first-degree pop. Still, the band was as tight as it was carefree, and the background harmonies conjured irrepressible grins even – check that, especially – when they occasionally missed the mark. This foursome was on top of its game. Furman's thunderous acoustic guitar pulse, the top-of-the-beat intensity of drummer Adam Abrutyn, the swelling harmonica lines that Furman nailed–if you weren't listening to the lyrics of "Take off your Sunglasses," you might have thought it was the E Street Band minus the organ, playing "The Promised Land." Then again, if you were feeling a little less generous, you could also have thought it was a long-lost Tom Petty hit. The x factor rendering all these comparisons irrelevant? That was Furman's voice.

He tosses off effortlessly clever ironies and allegories of lovesickness with a whoop so filled with abandon it drowns out all those Dylan comparisons. It came as a bit of a disappointment that Furman didn't have time to kick the band offstage for a solo acoustic set ("American Highway" woulda been nice...), but I guess that's what the album is for. Last night's rock 'n' roll, little had I known, was for dancing.

Note: the photo is not from Tuesday's show. It is from his January 6, 2008 show at the Mercury Lounge in New York.

Live Review: Akron/Family and Women 5.31.09

What better way to wrap up a five-month stint of cultural immersion in Bolgona, Italy, than by escaping to a tucked-away club outside of town for a concert by two North American bands no Italians have heard of?

Akron/Family and Women put on a blistering double billing at the Locomotiv Club here this weekend. Each band threw its recent album into the fire and cooked it Pittsburgh rare, until the sound and feel from the record turned scalding but stayed super-raw, putting a totally new taste in your mouth.

Women

Women opened up and quickly asserted that this show was as much theirs as Akron’s. Their brief self-titled debut album is a tube of tomato paste that you’ve left in the sun too long—highly condensed, and full of hazmat surprises. It’s rife with twists and turns and feels like a reference book of alternative influences. There’s the neo-naturalism of Grizzly Bear’s and Animal Collective’s old brands of freak-folk, manifested in a willingness to let an acoustic guitar and some co-oped vocals carry a piece, with the help of some trusty reverb (read: the first half of “Group Transport Hall,” featuring Women’s best melody). Women are at times industrial, at other times post-punky—as when their guitarists parlay an interface of two lightly distorted lines into a swirling cacophony à la Television. Often, the grittiness meets a sophisticated rhythmic sensibility that somehow propels the tunes ever forward, rather than halting and jerking them as Battles’ brand of math rock is wont to do.

Now imagine all this played by a band that listens to nothing but Fucked Up and My Bloody Valentine on the tour bus. At least that’s what it sounds like. Hiding from the drizzling rain beneath a tree outside the club after the set, I commented that the show was different from the record. “Yeah,” bassist Michael Wallace laughed. “Really different.” The song structures, even the instrumentation, stayed largely the same. But Women took their multidirectional vision, already steeped in lo-fi, and cranked up the volume to levels that (neighbors be grateful) can’t be reached in the basement. A friend who came with me to the show and who had hardly heard of Women before ended up calling their music “punk” and “hardcore;” meanwhile, I came away intrigued by the dejected, shoegazing quality that lead singer Patrick Flegel attached to his always distant vocals.

Check out this video of Women performing at CMJ last year via Pitchfork.tv:



Akron/Family

Akron/Family, now a three-piece after the 2007 departure of original member Ryan Vanderhoof, lived up to their reputation as a live powerhouse and one that sounds just as distinct from their recorded selves as Women do. Contrary to Allmusic’s oxymoronic attempts to pigeonhole – apparently “Akron/Family are one of those exasperatingly unknowable bands” but “their music … falls squarely into the freak folk category” – Akron concerts feel like exuberant explorations of the many directions in which their songs can be taken.

If I had to give it a genre, I’d call these New Agers’ style “freak-jam.” Songs like “Everyone Is Guilty,” the opener of impressive new album Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, swung about the spectrum of Akron’s sound. The trio jumped from a jaunty guitar groove to an intense communal chant of “Everyone is guilty” to a percussion-and-pedal section (different band members played a cowbell and a half-drunk water bottle and fiddled with a loop pedal); the tune eventually bloomed into a searing solo section.

The set closed with a simple ballad, sung in three-part harmony to the strumming of an acoustic guitar. The song’s only lyrics were, “Last year was a hard year for such a long time, / This year’s gonna be ours.” Although they did return for an encore of “Crickets,” the acoustic piece was a perfect capstone from this bearded threesome. The lyrics of their songs are effervescently positive and self-affirming, and at its best their music can feel like an unbounded spiritual release, sung in wild chants and deep, imperfect harmonies.

The photograph above is of Women's performance.

Live Review: Bonnie 'Prince' Billy 4.29.09

It must be a chore to be loved by Will Oldham. For the very same reasons, it is spectacular to hear him sing his songs.

The Kentucky-bred musician drenches the glorified sentimentalism of country-western parlance in the corrosive waters of philosophical disquiet. His intellect and self-doubt would probably be endearing if they didn’t have that nasty habit of seeping outward, like a puddle of scalding coffee from a chipped mug. They attack all the things he dares to love, and warn him quietly: “Beware.”

Cloaked in blue-and-white striped overalls and the pseudonym Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Oldham began Wednesday night at the Estragon in Bologna, Italy, with a series of relatively traditional saloon crooners. A stirring rendition of “You Don’t Love Me,” off his latest full-length, was an early highlight; Oldham and fiddler/secret weapon Cheyenne Mize called to each other in harmonies, at once wrenching and as sweet as funnel cake at the state fair: “You don’t love me, but that’s alright / ’Cause you cling to me all through the night.”

And then, somewhere about five songs in, the aircraft that’d been hovering in the ether over Dallas-Fort Worth International renounced the landing strip and headed for the stratosphere. With natural ease but fearsome adamancy, Oldham and his four-piece band careened into a set packed with equal parts summer love and hard-rock desperation—at times, the tempo changes and snare slams sounded about like a Liars concert would if a fiddler came in tow.

The passion that keeps Oldham on the avant-garde and pushing outward bursts from his pores in concert. He appeared to have situated the microphone six inches too low specifically so that he would have to contort himself to reach it, and when he put down his guitar for a few songs it was clearer than ever that he simply couldn’t pour everything he wished to into each song. He was left squirming and kicking and wrapping his black leather shoe around the back of his other ankle as he sang. On “Love Comes to Me,” he yelped and hopped between verses.

For all this helpless hungering, he was a man in control; there was a sureness in his eyes that he must have picked up at some point in the past 16-plus years of touring. I was convinced he had a towering stature until his roughly 5’8” frame sauntered up to the bar after the show.

In a thunderous depiction of “There Is Something I Have to Say,” Oldham cried out, “I feel deserving of love / Can it be something I dispose of / Or put away in a box under the bed?” It’s true that there is “I” splattered all over his lyrics. But simply calling Oldham a solipsist is as insufficient as calling him alt-country. For him, these are points of departure; where another musician might end a song, he and his band turn up the tempo and enter into a vicious call-and-response of guitar and fiddle and pounding drums. Where another lyricist might drown, poignantly enough, in his own sorrow, Oldham blends doubt with hope, hope with a vicious distrust, and then turns it all on the rest of the world. “And love will protect you / To the edge of the wood, / And a monster will get you / And love does no good,” he cautioned the flock of Italian-speaking spectators during “Even if Love.” And they believed him.

Note: the above photograph is not from Wednesday's concert; it was uploaded to Flickr on March 24, 2007, by user elspop :: concert photography.

Live Review: M. Ward 2.26.09

There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my "evil eye" upon this world; that is also my "evil ear." Finally to pose questions with a hammer, and sometimes to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound that can only come from bloated entrails — what a delight for one who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom just that which would remain silent must finally speak out.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that in 1888, and it’s never rung quite as true for me as it did on Thursday night. Only for me there’s no joy in the fall of this idol. And all I needed was one set of ears to hear him come crashing down.

 

I was willing to forgive M. Ward of his trespasses: his side project with Zooey Deschanel, its music as plasticky as the discs it’s sold on; his crushingly plain new solo album, so divorced from the sad, surreal world he used to inhabit and give glimpses into with breathy and breathtaking verses; that time on NPR last month when Bob Boilen asked him to play one more song “for the fans” and the singer refused without even a feint of an explanation. I was ready to write all these things off as bygones. You do that sort of thing for your idols.

 

But there is something serious afflicting the musician who put on one of the best shows of my life in September 2006, during his Post-War tour. Call it She & Him syndrome. Call it Norah Jones jaundice. Call it the New Pornographers pandemic. Whatever it is, he’s got it bad.

 

When Ward opened Thursday night’s show at Paris’s Café de la Danse with “Epistemology,” a straightforward love song from the new LP, I was excited to hear what the tune would sound like without the recorded version’s cloying strings. But as the band tumbled into the refrain, Ward’s electric guitarist reached for his synthesizer, sending shammed violins and cellos out through the speaker rack.

 

As the night wore on, it became clear that Ward’s band was determined to crunch and distort the nuances out of every song it touched—most disappointingly, the old gems “Chinese Translation” and “Vincent O’Brien.” Ward has never been an “indie” musician in the typical sense, so much as a folk musician with a magnificently ethereal touch. But it was that otherworldliness – in his lyrics, instrumentation, and presentation – that made his work so artful. On Thursday, there was barely any of that. Ballads were subjected to cheesy, blue-eyed soul vocal harmonies, while beloved rollickers like “Vincent O’Brien” got buried under profuse fuzz. This was a mediocre roots-rock bar band that had had a few too many beers before sound check.

 

Ward’s six-song acoustic interlude was the highlight of the show, with “One Hundred Million Years” and a finger-picking instrumental medley as standouts. But it is clear that twilight is fading into night over M. Ward’s dream world of fishing boats, rusty guitar strings, and deep, dark wells.

Note: the above photograph is not from Thursday's concert; it was taken at his Friday performance at Paradiso in Amsterdam. It was uploaded by Flickr user Guus Krol.

Live Review: Islands 2.20.09

“Saturday night in Bologna!” Nick Thorburn declared, trying out his rock-star shout with at least a tinge of sheepishness. A slight cheer came up from the crowd, packed in beneath his feet. Then the needle met the arena-rock balloon: “It’s Friday,” an audience member called back. Psssst, the air came out.

 

But Thorburn was not to be discouraged. The singer is usually saddled with a six-string, but during a song with no rhythm guitar near the end of Islands’ set last night, he decided to do some prancing on the tiny stage. He snatched the microphone from its clip, and with a toss that was just a touch too consciously irreverent to work, he shoved the mic stand off the stage and onto the head of a plump, unenthusiastic photographer. She wasn’t there to hear the band, and she definitely wasn’t there to get strafed with hardware. Thorburn anxiously grabbed the stand and apologized by patting her frowning head.

 

Never the quitter, Thorburn came back out to the front of the stage later in the song, leaned over, stuck out his butt, and kissed foreheads for about fifteen seconds with the tallest, most bearded, most indifferent man standing in the front row, shouting lyrics into the microphone and into his new friend's face.

 

While Islands have a long way to go before they reach the stadium stardom to which they might aspire, they’ve got one thing going for them: they can play. This is a band of experts, and their live show is as tight as Thorburn’s black jeans (skin-sucking, to be exact). Onstage at the Covo Club in Bologna, Italy, Islands made it clear that this is how they should be appreciated—in concert. For a dancy indie-pop band, that’s pretty remarkable.

 

With precision where necessary and volatile abandon elsewhere, the quintet mixed ripping, distorted guitar lines with escalating violin riffs and tropical-island (lowercase) drum beats. (Xylophonist/second violinist Sebastian Chow sat out last night; maybe they couldn’t fit a sixth member on the stage.) Lay Thorburn’s haunting, veneered voice on top of these instrumentals and you come away with the reason “Creeper” and “The Arm,” dance-happy tunes from last year’s lukewarmly received sophomore effort, stole the show.

Blend the Killers and Michael Jackson and you get Maroon 5. But throw Grizzly Bear’s mystery and Elvis Costello’s swagger into the mix, and you’ve got a stellar show.

Live Review: Oxford Collapse 2.5.09

Talking with Oxford Collapse after an incendiary show last night at the Locomotiv Club in Bologna, Italy, a funny thing came to light: This band doesn’t really like new music.

Obviously, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But as drummer Dan Fetherston told me, “Yeah, we heard the new Fleet Foxes album. We listened to the first half ’cause somebody gave it to us, but we got bored. I’d rather listen to Crosby, Stills and Nash, you know?” After a thirty-minute discussion of R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, and Mike Watt, I, perfectly pleased if a bit incredulous, asked, “So do you guys listen to any current bands?” The three-piece scrounged out a laconic list of albums, almost all by bands they have toured with. But it’s Appetite for Destruction that Fetherston “could talk for a day about.” Arcade Fire, meanwhile, is “a perfect example of a band that Oxford Collapse couldn’t care less about.” Bassist Adam Rizer said with a wistful laugh, "You can't control when you're born." (The encasing on their time capsule isn’t entirely sound, though: I did catch Fetherston singing, “You don’t have to go to collllllege,” to himself on the dressing room couch.)

This all made a lot of sense in light of the evening’s concert, a brimming show that painted last year’s BITS in a flattering new light. Onstage, the post-punk thrash and deliberately off-key vocals took on a sense of true abandon. There was none of that feeling of art for art’s sake that can be infuriating about this band, so often the subject of crude comparisons to groups like Liars and Animal Collective but unequipped to handle them. Last night was 1981, it was hot with the rhapsodic harmonies of Rizer and guitarist Michael Pace, it was the snare pounds of “The Birthday Wars” that threw at least the four Americans standing just beneath the stage into a whipping, whirling furor (the rest of the crowd proved dishearteningly reserved).

If this band is more concerned with Nebraska than Illinois, so be it. And if they’re in town, go see them—despite how you may feel about the records.

• Click here to see the music video for "The Birthday Wars." Actually, just see it live.