But I Was There: The Long Blondes @ the Echo, 6/15/07; Hot Chip @ the Henry Fonda, 6/13/07

Sorry, Ms. Jackson, but I am for real

The Long Blondes, "Five Ways To End It" - Ever since the Arcade Fire broke (relatively) huge a couple of years ago, there's been a lot of talk about "record-collection rock", a blanket description for a wildly disparate group of subgenres which all operate under the perfectly reasonable assumption that their audience isn't missing a single reference. Like most blanket descriptions, it's more or less useless; not only does it extend far beyond rock at this point (We Got It 4 Cheap, anyone?), but more often than not it doesn't even have anything to do with either the audience's or the artists' respective musical histories. Is, for instance, Neon Bible a more enjoyable record when you're able to parse it down to its influences? Can you enjoy Beach House without ever having heard a Nico record? Is there any substance to From Here We Go To Sublime beyond the deciphering of its samples? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is a big, unironic HELL YES; I could more or less give copies of each of those records to my mom and she'd more than likely be able to discern the appeal of each of them without a whole lot of effort (not that she'd necessarily like them, of course - my mom may be cool, but I can't really see her digging into the Kompakt aesthetic too willingly). Ironically, the Long Blondes rarely get classified alongside records like these despite being the referential peer of any of them; more often than not, they just get tarred with the same Nu Britpop brush that's been applied to everyone from the Guillemots to the Futureheads simply because they share the same aesthetic. Needless to say, I see things differently - I see the Long Blondes as the most explicitly (and certainly the most effectively) allusive band working today with the possible exception of LCD Soundsystem. And last month, I got proof. Twice.

As you can probably infer from the title of this post, one of those forms of proof was their show at the Echo, a show which, but for an encounter with a buncha Frenchies a few weeks earlier, would have run away with the title of best show I've seen this year and never come back. To say that the Long Blondes understand their fanbase is an understatement of historic proportions; I've seen millionaire televangelists preach to their flock with a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the implicit understanding that the Blondes - and especially Kate Jackson - demonstrated that Friday night. I hasten to add that they didn't necessarily have the whole crowd eating out of their hand; Los Angeles being the way that it is, whenever some buzzworthy British band shows up to do a show, at least a quarter of the crowd is going to consist of (1) industry fuckers approaching the event as an excuse to do some tax-deductible drinking and (2) scenester turds who'll all hopefully break their backs in the shower and starve to death from the resulting neglect some day, and this show was no exception. The difference, however, was obvious in everyone else - in the way they sang along with every line to their favorite songs, or the way they broke out in rapturous applause whenever Jackson set herself apart through a moment of divinely inspired howling, or, most tellingly, the way they recognized even the most obscure b-sides within a few bars. I mean, before that night I wasn't sure anyone else in Los Angeles had ever even heard "Fulwood Babylon", but I'll be damned if the crowd didn't outright erupt as soon as Jackson started hissing about people thinking she was being perverse on purpose. Well done, Los Angeles. Back of the net.

BUT, and this is important, the river does run both ways - it's very clear that the Long Blondes are just as cognizant of their audience as their audience is of them. Most bands touring in support of their recently-released album tend to play as much of that album as they can possibly manage to fit into their allotted time onstage; this way they get to reinforce the superiority of everyone in the audience who's already heard it while offering up an enticing taste for all the newbies who've just heard a song or two on the radio. They'll also tease their big songs, arranging them into sets which play to a different energy than the albums from which they're culled to make the experience seem distinct from the one offered up by the record; this is why Franz Ferdinand used to (and may still - I dunno) close their shows with "Darts of Pleasure". The Blondes, on the other hand, were having none of that shit; blessed with an awareness of how their songs work on their audiences, they put together a set stuffed full of b-sides (although it would be unethical to point out that some of these b-sides, including "Five Ways To End It", made it onto the bonus disc of the American release of Someone To Drive You Home) arranged to elicit the same effect that they would at at home or in the car - opening their set with "Lust In The Movies", using "You Could Have Both" as the anchor of the latter half of the collected songs, etc. It helps, of course, that they all turned out to be just as good at playing those songs as their records had promised - seriously, Jackson's voice could fill an empty room and still keep oozing through the cracks in the siding - but it was clear from note one that the sine qua non for their capacity to play as well as they did in the first place was their recognition of their songs' withering effectiveness on an audience who'd acquainted themselves with the process of losing their shit to them.

Well, actually, that's not quite the whole truth, which brings me to the second form of proof of their incomparability afforded to me last month. A few days before they showed up to raze the Echo to the ground, I was lucky enough to interview Jackson for a feature in the Rockit (which just went up a few days ago - dig in), which more or less confirmed every preujudice I'd already entered into with regards to the Long Blondes. For one, it turns out Jackson really is the single most intoxicatingly alluring woman on the face of the earth, just not in the way I'd been expecting - over the phone, every shred of the carefully-cultivated, immaculately-manicured edge she projects in her music morphs into the most confoundingly charming concoction of articulate forthrightness and good-humored self-effacingness imaginable. I mean, I might as well have interviewed Pam from The Office, only Pam wouldn't hang up the phone and begin dropping note-perfect intonations about the tenability of happy endings. More to the point, however, Jackson might have been the canniest subject I've ever interviewed, a statement which doesn't cover much time but does include both Al P from MSTRKRFT and James motherfucking Murphy, two dudes who most emphatically know how to do the D.A.N.C.E. with inquisitive music critics. I don't think I asked her a single question for which she didn't seem to have an elegantly-couched response, a result I'll acknowledge owes a substantial debt to the fact that I'm hardly the first stuttering dork to ask her about what it's like being from Sheffield as long as I'm able to get the point across that holy crap does this lady ever understand the conditions of her band's commercial existence. There were moments when I legitimately wondered whether I was simply playing Jeff Gannon (er, minus all the dude-fucking) to her Dubya.

The more I think about it, though, that might just be the whole point of the Long Blondes as an artistic endeavor. As bizarre as this is going to sound coming from someone who's spent the last eight months screaming at everyone in earshot about the virtues of a band that name-checks Scott Walker as a totem of self-enforced loneliness, I'm starting to think that the touchstones which make up so much of the Blondes' body of work aren't really the primary sites of identification for their audience - rather, it matters less that they invoke Arlene Dahl effectively than the fact that they invoke her in the first place. After all, the only thing over which the crowd at the Echo was bonding was the presence of the Long Blondes; the band's insanely nuanced references might have gotten their foot in the door, but it was their immaculate conception of their own specific brand of art that got that crowd going berzerk. Take, for instance, their inclusion of "Five Ways To End It" in their set: given both its relative obscurity and the degree to which Erol Alkan's production played a role in the effectiveness of the original, they'd have been completely forgiven if they'd just chosen to play something else instead. But no; during my interview Jackson kept insisting on "Five Ways" as one of her favorite songs to perform due to both how much she enjoyed performing it and her simple, fan-ish appreciation for the way the synths swirled all over the track, and by the time she got done performing it for the crowd at the echo, you'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone who'd have disagreed with her. Ever since then, I've been thinking that maybe that's the secret of effective record-collector rock, then: it's not so much about knowing who else is on your audience's shelves so much as knowing for damn certain that you're in the mix and in no danger of being replaced. (Click here to buy the American edition of Someone To Drive You Home, which includes a bonus disc featuring four of the Alkan-produced b-sides, from Amazon)

Hot Chip, "Ready For A Fall" (Live at Bonnaroo, 6/15/07) - Believe me, I'm as surprised as you to see the B-word mentioned on this site; you've got my word that if there were any other proof of this song's existence (especially a better recording of it), I'd gladly be using it instead. But oh well - having heard some of the songs performed live, I feel pretty safe in reporting that Hot Chip's forthcoming album damn well ought to be the best album of whatever year in which it ends up being released. I mean, their live show is incredibly good and they certainly do know how to switch up their songs for a live audience (at the risk of spoiling their show for anyone who hasn't caught it yet, don't be surprised if you walk out with a renewed appreciation for New Order's "Temptation") and holy HELL can the little guy sing, but c'mon; the news of the day was the fact half of their set consisted of new stuff, and all of it sounded atrociously great. All of it, however, bowed down to "Ready For A Fall", a song I would have no problem calling Hot Chip's best song ever if I weren't a little gunshy after dropping that same tag on "My Piano" just a few weeks before (not that I'm necessarily wrong, mind you - "My Piano" is fucking TREMENDOUS). As with all the best Hot Chip Songs Ever, it comes down to the Chip's apparent ability to seemingly flip a switch and have their song absolutely roar to life; I'm a big fan of their Stone Grooves, Maaaaan like "Boy From School" and "From Drummer To Driver", but I'm an exponentially bigger fan of their more thrilling moments, like the bit on "Over and Over" where the drums kick in on the chorus or when That Bassline first pokes its head out on "Playboy", so it's probably not too surprising that "Ready For A Fall", which contains arguably the most emphatically devastating moment of OH SHIT HERE COMES THE WHOLE SONG-ness in their entire catalogue. Again, the recording is not the greatest here; you'll have to endure a fair amount of hooting hippies for a while and the band comes across as kinda muffled, but stick with it; you'll wind up with a pretty damn good idea of what I'm talking about. I mean, we're talking about a song good enough to force me to acknowledge the existence of Bonna-fucking-roo here; this is clearly unimaginably crucial territory for you to explore. I seriously cannot wait to give someone money for this album. (Click here to visit Hot Chip's homepage, or click here to buy The Warning from Amazon.com if you're the last dumbass on earth who doesn't own it already.)

Della Humphrey, "Dream Land" - In what I can only conceive of as a direct response to my bragging about my ability to decipher the musical metatext of Soul Jazz' Studio One reggae compilations, a while back the label put out Studio One Women, quite possibly the most misleading title in the history of the series. It's a million miles away from bad, naturally, but most of it turned out to be traditional reggae, which of course is perfectly
fine but just not my personal cup of tea; I vastly prefer the kind of reggae which makes an effort to employ the kind of commercial strategies which could have earned its exemplars playtime on American radio, so I'd been hoping for Studio One Women to have featured a couple of dusty old gems in the vein of Susan Cadogan or Dawn Penn and, unsurprisingly, never really made it very far into the record. Luckily for me, I'm both lazy and an idiot, and as a consequence of my half-assed attitude towards streamlining the contents of my iPod found "Dream Land" popping up randomly one night, only to be repeated roughly eighty squillion times since. It still barely sounds like American music, of course - I guess you can kinda hear echoes of songbirds like, I 'unno, Dusty Springfield in the clarity of Mrs. Humphrey's voice, but the song itself is such a stuttering, loping little jaunt that it's hard to imagine it catching Berry Gordy's ear. This is mostly due to the song's distinctive dynamic - after all, for a song that barely cracks the two-and-a-half minute mark, it sure takes its sweet time in getting to the chorus - but just as much due to the stripped-down sound; aside from Humphrey's vocals, the only instrument really on display here is arguably that twangy guitar. But it's more than enough; when traditional reggae's firing on all cylinders, it doesn't need to be showy; it can rely on the logic of its trademark arrangements to carry the day, and lord knows that's precisely what happens here. Seriously, just give this a shot. (Click here to buy Studio One Women from Amazon.com)