But I Was There: The Long Blondes @ the Echo, 6/5/08

<3

The Long Blondes, "The Couples" - By all rights, this should have been the most soul-crushingly depressing show in history. Despite my years of unyieldingly vehement advocacy, the Long Blondes have yet to secure the kind of Stateside profile necessary to warrant a headlining gig at the Troubadour; Indie 103 couldn't even be bothered to show up and park their damn van outside, meaning the Long Blondes have less pull in Los Angeles than the motherfucking Ting Tings. Consequently, the Troubadour was dismally empty - I mean, %60-capacity empty, nobody-in-the-VIP-section empty, easily-find-a-new-spot-if-you-hate-your-neighbors empty. There might have even been more people present for show-opening douchebag-ensemble Castledoor, which is a real shame on account of fuck those guys.

The only thing keeping the show from being an outright disaster, as it turned out, was Kate Jackson's absolute and unchecked delight at playing the Troubadour, and it turned out to be way more than enough, too. It could have been an act, of course; Jackson's blindsiding sexiness (whoever had "158 words in" in the pool, go pick up your check) had the crowd making asses of themselves trying to get her attention from more or less the instant she took the stage, and for once in my bitter, hateful little life even I can't bring myself to make fun of them. (well, except for the guy who yelled out "SHEFFIELD!" - seriously, why do people do this? should Kate Jackson come to your place of employment and start blurting out "THOUSAND OAKS!"? actually, that would be pretty awesome. SHEFFIELD!) Never in my life have I seen a performer do such an effective job of making every girlfriend in the room get hell of uncomfortable simultaneously; I saw like five girls grabbing their guys for dear life within the first three songs, the unspoken message being I am going to cut your nuts off if you call me Kate tonight.

But to be honest, I'm inclined to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt, if only because of how often she kept breaking her own character as the most circuit-fryingly hot indie girl in the universe to completely and totally geek out over her surroundings. In addition to a half-dozen references to the venue during the show, when the band were dragged back out onstage for an encore (presumably the delay was due to Dorian Cox giving the sound guy several dozen strategically-placed cuts - the sound was all over the place during the show, particularly during "Century" where the climactic synth freakout was barely even audible), she shyly told the audience about how she'd been dreaming of playing the Troubadour since she was thirteen, which was awesome. It would certainly explain the stupefying effort she put into singing the everliving hell out of her band's songs, too. You can always tell when someone's really enjoying singing what they're singing - no flubbed notes, no overextensions, inability to keep still while doing it, etc. Well, Jackson was all that and more for an hour straight last night; her only miscue was accidentally going back into the chorus of "Guilt Has Nothing To Do With It" once too many times (a mistake for which she immediately apologized to every member in the band one-by-one - AWWWWWW), and you'll have to forgive me if I have a hard time seeing her fervor to keep singing as anything other than supportive of her enthusiasm.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that her performance of the songs off the new album were remarkable enough to insist upon another shot for the Long Blondes' second album, a record to which I've been despairingly indifferent until hearing Jackson sing some of its songs last night. I have no idea how my favorite band + the coolest producer on the planet + a track record of adjective-defyingly awesome b-sides =/= awesomeness, but that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes; hell, I'm not crazy about Wilson Pickett In Philadelphia either. Besides, after last night's show I've got no problem placing the blame squarely on Erol Alkan's shoulders; the band absolutely demolished any complaints about the songs not sounding lively or rocking enough for my liking without the benefit of any complex double- or triple-tracking arrangements or manicured synth polish. Instead, what you got was Kate Jackson absolutely belting out everything, and even having seen them last year I still wasn't ready for just how completely Jackson throws herself into the new stuff. My favorite was, as you may have guessed, "The Couples", which sounds awesome live - it's just as wiry and slinky and upbeat as their old stuff, with plenty of opportunities for Jackson to sultrify things as she sees fit - but could have just as easily gone to their set-opening "Here Comes The Serious Bit" or big? single? "Guilt", all of which she just absolutely inhabited like she was afraid of the Sandman Hook.

I realize, of course, that I've fallen into the same trap as every other heterosexual music-show-review-writing-dude on the planet and blathered on about Jackson at the expense of everyone else in the band; I'd even avow that that's an even greater shame than usual given the show that they each put on - Cox snapping at the sound techs one moment and sullenly shaking a banana-shaped maraca on "Too Clever By Half" the next, Emma Chaplin trying to keep him from running up into the booth and choking a bitch, the comedic stylings of Screech Louder (ugh), Reenie Hollis playing the bass with Entwhistlian stoicism... these are all good things, the kind of things that make a good show great, and certainly not the kind of things which any critic worth his salt would bury under an avalanche of starstruck gushing for their more-famous bandmate. I have no defense apart from Jackson's singular ebullience. She was the one who couldn't shut up about the Troubadour, home of the $8.50 seven-and-sevens. She was the one who insisted on engaging the crowd at every turn, even going so far as to invite the audience to stick around for a drink. She was the one telling stories about wanting to sing at the Troubadour since the days when she wanted to fuck Duff McKagan. I mean, there's absolutely such a thing as fawning adulation in this world, but sometimes, fair's just fair. (Click here to buy "Couples" from Amazon.com)

(And an extra-special thanks to whoever's decision it was to play Evie Sands' "A Woman's Work Is Never Done" between the two bands' sets - you blew my fucking MIIIIIIIIIIIND.)

ELSEWHERE
- So in an effort to keep me posting more regularly, I've decided to abandon the old several-mp3s-in-one-post trope; this way (in theory) I don't have to sit around waiting for enough content to justify a post and can just throw shit up as it appears to me. Will this strategy prove successful? WHO KNOWS~

But I Was There: The Wombats/The Squares @ Cinespace, 8/7/07

Guaranteed to leave your memory less than "Crystal" clear (GET IT?!??!)

The Squares, "Bottle Me Up" (album version) - Long-time readers - a category which, in relation to this site, refers to anyone who's been reading longer than since, like, February - may remember a long, rambly (moreso than usual, even) post I wrote about my friend Shaun's band the Squares - or, rather, about basically everything EXCEPT the Squares. It's not that they were a bad band, but when it came to their music, them crazy kids were so clearly (a) working in a musical idiom (poppy emo) that tends to leave yr boy kinda flat and (b) in desperate, pleading need of tightening up their sound that I was left with no choice but to do the critical fan dance. That, however, was several squillion months ago; in the interim, they cut their drummer loose, replaced him with some new dude they found on Craigslist, somehow got themselves booked as the opening act for the Wombats' gig at Cinespace on Tuesday night, and then proceeded to blow my fucking mind with just how good they've gotten since their last appearance in this space. I mean, I still wouldn't put them in the same echelon as Escort or Explorer's Club or the Procession when we're setting up the list of up-and-coming American indie-rock royalty, but man oh man did they ever get good. I mean, hell, I've only been waiting for nine months to see the Wombats, but thanks to the Squares (and the gallons of promotional vodka I poured down my throat) I barely have anything to say about them.

Well, okay, that's not true. The Wombats were, of course, fun as fuck, although anything less from a band who put out an album as riotously enjoyable as Girls, Boys, & Marsupials (an album which I'm still loving almost as much all these months after getting it - outside of the Long Blondes' Someone To Drive You Home, I'm hard-pressed to think of a nu-Britpop album with a comparable shelf-life) would be unacceptable. I missed a few songs looking for a bathroom in which to relieve myself of some of the aforementioned free vodka so I may have missed them playing "Lost in the Post", but other than that they kept their set lean, mean, and with a definite ebb and flow to it - hell, they kicked things off with "Girls, Boys, & Marsupials" (aka the acapella album-closer) seemingly as a piss-take, although it did do a fine job of building anticipation for the rocking-er moments yet to come. And boy did they ever come; when the 'bats launched into "Moving To New York", you could practically hear the audience's collective interest come to a knife-sharp point, no mean feat considering that we're talking about a TUESDAY AT CINESPACE here - it takes one hell of a band to get a room full of label reps to stop trading war stories from lining up to buy an iPhone, but damned if the Wombats didn't pull it off.

Unfortunately, it has to be said that in doing so, they didn't really offer up anything which couldn't be gleaned just as easily from the album. That's not a dis, of course - believe me, there's plenty of bands who I can only wish were good enough to be as good as their recorded stuff, especially when the stuff in question is as indisputably top-shelf as Girls, Boys & Marsupials - but it did put them at something of a competitive disadvantage when trying to seize the crown from the Squares, who turned in an eye-opening set for anyone who'd ever come in contact with their music previously. I really actually feel kinda bad foaming at the mouth about the salutary effects of the Squares replacing their drummer given how much of said drummer's beer I've drunk over the years at Shaun's house parties, but facts are fuckin' facts: the simple act of shoring up one pillar of their rhythm section seems to have galvanized both of the other Squares into getting their shit into lockstep formation, and the end result is just a quantum leap in the right direction. For one thing, given their predilection for glossy, prefab indie-pop, the ability to keep rigidly to a beat is of paramount importance; this is, after all, a band that worships at the feet of the Cars, and I think we can all agree that "Shake It Up" would be exponentially less satisfying if David Robinson had gone slippin' and slidin' all over the place. More crucially, though, having a reliable rhythm section frees Shaun's vocals from being forced to give their songs their shape. Shaun's not a bad singer, but he does have one of those idiosyncratic thin indie yelping timbres to his voice which works about eleven thousand times better complementing the rest of the track as opposed to leading it by the nose into Proper Songville. And now that Shaun isn't compelled to try to fill in inconsistently-laid-out patterns thanks to their new drummer and his ability to actually create rigid rhythms (as opposed to alluding to their existence - again, sry Nate), he can focus on performing the songs more effectively, and boy is he ever able to do so.

Look, I'm not trying to argue that the Squares are glory-bound for stardom now; they've still got a ways to go, especially when it comes to pruning the their songs' lyrical content for the benefit of how well it scans (this is going to sound seriously ironic coming from my sesquipedalian ass, but I'm a firm believer in the idea that all bands with any designs on going big should try to write songs based around hooks of no more than either two words or four syllables). But listen to "Bottle Me Up" and tell me you can't hear the pop chops already present, even in this old mix with their old drummer (not the best way to present evidence for the band's advancement, I admit, but they haven't rerecorded this song with their new drummer and it really is the best showcase for their faculties as a pop band), and imagine how much more effectively they'd be able to be deployed with a more capable rhythm section. I mean, I'm not saying they're going to be the next U2 or Radiohead or OMC or what have you - I'm just trying to say that, with a little work, they could turn out to be an indie-pop outfit capable of scratching the same itches as Los Campesinos! or the Moths, and that's not a bad place for a young band to be. (Click here to buy the Squares' Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead direct from the band, or click here to buy digital copies of Wombats song from their digital store. Also, anyone who wants to buy me the Official Wombats Cuddly Wombat may feel free to do so.)

The Long Weekend, "Record" - Speaking of bands about whom I hate to talk shit, here's the Long Weekend, a band which seems downright poised to be this year's edition of the template filled out so ably last year by the Rifles. Looking back at their debut single "Medway Is The Difference (Between My Town And Yours)", I'm frankly a little embarassed that it took me so long to reach that conclusion; it took me about four seconds' worth of "Record" to lead me to the conclusion that these guys' one trick involves robbing Mod titans blind without feeling the need to cite their sources. This certainly isn't to say that I give a fuck, of course; for one, the Kinks have always left me kinda cold (that's right, I said it - motherfuck a Village Green Presevation Society), and for another, the Long Weekend are really really really effective thieves, or at least certainly good enough at thievin' to lift me up and over any lingering angst over credibility from my days as a middle-school dumbass. I mean, "Record" isn't anything even remotely novel; even restricted simply to the context of the band's output, its most original feature is probably that tambourine which shows up for the chorus to lend it a little Stax-y flavor, and what with Mark Ronson's existence this year it's a little hard to laud that as a stroke of heroic boldness. The thing is,the song they've come up with is so invigorating and effective that I just don't have it in me to give a fuck; the overall arrangement of "Record" is so expertly managed that I don't even have it in me to knock the band for tacking superfluous real estate onto such an obvious candidate for a three-minute gem of a pop single. I have no idea how well this approach will (or even can) play out over the course of an album, but I do know that I'll be checking in with the Long Weekend every chance I get to get a better idea. Oh, and I also know that that Rifles album deserved way better treatment than it got from the open market. If nothing else, it's at least better than the friggin' Maccabees album. (Click here to buy the "Record" 7" from Norman Records)

The Rushes, "Ripping It Down" - Look, as someone who's an avowed-enough sucker for a big, space-filling piano to find himself constitutionally incapable of switching stations whenever Train's "Drops of Jupiter" comes on (hands-down the most shameful admission in the history of this blog, and that covers some ground), my admiration for the Rushes' "Ripping It Down" was more or less a given - make it through the first thirty seconds and you'll hear what I'm talking about. What I'd like to draw your attention towards, however, is everything else about this song - or, better yet, everything else which inevitably won't be a factor in whether or not they start pulling in that Coldplay cream. I mean, sure, I guess you can focus on the almost-abrasive friendliness of the track's structuring or its mom-beckoning falsetto opening - yeah, okay, it's kinda breathtakingly cloying and tacky, and given my explosive allergy to wussy bullshit like the Turin Brakes or Richard Hawley I can't really fault anyone for turning elsewhere. But good lord, do I ever pity those of you who check out early on this one; you'll be missing out on some truly glorious multi-part harmonies and a tempo-shift which you can practically see the drummer poised at the ready to launch into and a piano being played by someone who really knows who to wring it dry of drama. I mean, these are downright inexhaustible virtues, folks; I've overlooked worse crimes against music for far lesser rewards (as previously mentioned - seriously, sheesh), and as long as the Rushes keep offering them up with such smirk-free ease, I'll be making a point to keep right on keepin' on. "Ripping It Down" is just a spectacular song, easily the best one I'm posting in this batch, and its b-side ("Will You Won't You") is shockingly close to being almost as good, so hopefully I'll be able to do so for years to come. (Click here to buy the "Ripping It Down" 7" from Piccadilly. Also, simply because the potential for lolz grossly outweighs the guilt which comes from being a jerk, I do have to point out this post on their MySpace blog which may well typify Spectacular Review-Oriented Indie Butthurtedness for the next decade and beyond - seriously, gang, anytime you start off a post by declaring that you'd never give a second thought to reviews, you've more or less pushed the horse out of the barn and blown the door into smithereens already. Doesn't reduce their gifts as songsmiths one iota, though.)

Sparrow House, "The Reflection" (Daytrotter session) - Part of me kinda thinks that the next Voxtrot album should be a split affair, with half the tracks going to Ramesh & the Gang and the other half being given over wholly to keyboardist Jared Van Fleet's Sparrow House project; I kinda get the feeling that the contrast between Voxtrot's insistent dynamism and Sparrow House's trademark lo-fi whispery gentility would go a long way towards rectifying the complaints of the nation of folks who are wholeheartedly entitled to their desperately wrong opinions about Voxtrot (i.e. everyone except me and Cindy Hotpoint). Of course, I also kinda think that Van Fleet has it in him to come up with even more compelling songs on his own than with his bandmates; if I had any doubt left after the gorgeously unassuming "When I Am Gone" (available for downloading on Sparrow House's site), it all certainly got resolved by the time he came knocking to do a Daytrotter session and dropped this woozy, gauzy, breezy, other-adjectives-which-end-in-zy little gem on us all. I mean, this is gorgeous stuff in the same vein of those Lou Reed songs where he capitulates to prettiness, and that simply isn't ground which gets covered by bands these days; one can only shudder to think of how effectively Van Fleet might be able to use actual production facilities to create sonic space rather than simply relying on the acoustics of the room in which he happened to stumble upon a piano. (Click here to buy the first Sparrow House EP direct from Van Fleet. Oh, and don't be a retarded person - just buy Voxtrot and learn to like it.)

But I Was There: Daft Punk @ the LA Sports Arena, 7/21/07

FORESHADOWING

Daft Punk, "Face to Face" - The older I get, the more the world makes it apparent that I perceive the unfolding of history - or at least musical history - in an incalculably skewed sense. It's probably an overwhelmingly obvious point to make, but since I (and, if you're reading this blog, probably you too) tend to gravitate towards more marginal artists and musical idioms, the march of time has a way of revealing what I understand at the time to be epic, world-changing events to "just" be really fun shows; I may have had a better time seeing LCD Soundsystem at the Echo back in 2004 more than any other concert I've ever attended, but even within the then-volatile context of "dancepunk" or "the DFA" or even "indie music" in general, it changed absolutely nothing for anyone who wasn't in attendance that night, although anyone who was there and came away with anything other than a life-affirming spectacle in no way deserves to call themselves a fan of anything for the rest of their lives. I did, however, see Daft Punk at Coachella last year, and if their performance at the Sports Arena last Saturday taught me one thing, it's that I was absolutely there for at least one musical Ground Zero, even if the consequences of said event haven't necessarily fully unveiled themselves to me just yet.

For one, it's clear to me that no performance Daft Punk will ever put on could even approach their Coachella set even if just to kiss the ring. Admittedly, the Los Angeles factor may have hardwired me for disappointment to a certain extent; my adopted hometown is, after all, the place where the country turns when it needs instructions on how to best appropriate someone else's experience, so it's not like I was surprised to see a bunch of frat-bros-turned-indie-dance-snobs attempting to out-enjoy the rapturous reviews of what went down that night in the desert rather than simply appreciate the show being put on in front of them. Inexplicably, some of them seemed to fail to glean even the most incidental shred of pleasure from the evening's festivities, resulting in the disruption of what would have been a sea of people leaping into the air consumed by a singular desire to howl along with "One More Time" with intermittant dudes in black shirts and backwards-turned baseball caps unwilling to respond beyond nodding their heads in a show of Serious Appreciation; justice will only be served on the day that each and every one of these people get raped by a horse in front of their parents. There's also the not-insubstantial factor that the Sports Arena's soundsystem could be adequately described as "pathetic"; whereas the mids were crystal clear at Coachella, last weekend they sounded more or less as if the speakers had been tipped over onto the carcass of a grizzly bear. Yet while neither of these situations were ideal (to say the butt-fuckin' least), they're really just symptoms of the show rather than descriptors; I have a bunch of friends going to their show in Seattle, and I'm pretty sure they'll come back with a similar set of complaints.

No, what was missing from last Saturday's show was - if you'll pardon the pun - the element of discovery. People who only heard about Daft Punk throwing the bombest live shows in the history of bombitute through the internet's collective push to gush over their Coachella set rarely even hear about the fact that, until those tones from Close Encounters ambled out of the speakers, nobody in the audience had a fucking clue as to what to expect. After all, not only had Daft Punk not played live in something like six years, but they were fresh off releasing Human After All, an album I still consider earth-shakingly disappointing; it might have been overpoweringly improbable that they'd drop a set that would diminish Discovery or Homework in retrospect, but as anyone who saw New Order the year before could probably tell you, that certainly didn't eliminate the possibility that their set - their big, triumphant, return-to-form performance - might be really, really boring. Part of me still thinks that all the attendees' post-coital glow centered in large part around the fact that they just didn't suck - I mean, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but all fleeting moments of introspection that I took away from that set as it was in the process of being assembled in front of me all expressed sentiments like "Holy shit, am I actually enjoying Human After All?!"

It's also important to consider that in many ways, that Coachella set laid out a blueprint for how dance music might be able to present itself as a mass-market arena commodity. Their set, after all, wasn't a rave, which is a nice way of saying that it was in no way a simple pretext for people to take drugs and try to fuck each other; Daft Punk explicitly came to put on a show which would in no way compromise one's capacity to lose one's shit to the fullest extent physically available. Nobody - and I mean nobody - in that tent was turned to face their partner or some oblique light source or, really, anything except that pyramid. In retrospect, it's a pretty genius move if only because of the intractability at the heart of Daft Punk's music; songs like "Harder Better Faster Stronger" are events, not part of the diegetic soundtrack of your life. I kinda think that it's this aspect of their set which kept it at the forefront of my mind during the Great Justice Echoplex Annihilation of Dickety-Seven - just because the Ed Banger dudez' show might have been exponentially lower-tech (e.g. swapping out jaw-droppingly forbidding pyramid technology for the sight of Steve Aoki coming utterly unglued in front of God and Jesus and the Cobrasnake and everyone) didn't make it any easier to ignore, which kinda seemed like the point. "These guys", Daft Punk's set seemed to teach the crowd of rapturously eager students, "aren't here to soundtrack your night - these guys are your night until it just gets unbearable under those helmets."

Like I said, at the Sports Arena, this was pretty much common knowledge, and I feel pretty confident in saying that I'm not just interpreting the evening's festivities along my own perceptions when I say that. My first inkling came courtesy of the aforementioned assembled frat-bros; my second came when SebastiAn and Kavinsky took the stage for twenty minutes in between Ratatat's crushingly boring set and Daft Punk's, well, Daft Punkery and with the exception of the stragglers determined to have a Very Conspicuous Night of Fun and Dancing Which Involves Invading Neighbors' Space at all costs, the crowd all but stood at attention waiting for the preordained moment at which Daft Punk would take the stage and render it OK to become unhinged. Almost to an individual, these folks all conjured up the image of nothing so much as someone who's heard their friends (or, worse, their internet friends) spend the last fifteen months gushing about that time when they layered "Crescendolls" on top of "Around the World" and dude you just wouldn't believe it dude, which is fine if we're being fair (after all, the only way to have avoided it would have necessitated the whole world being able to fit under that tent last year) but, in practice, kinda left me feeling like I was about to be accused of plagarism for a paper I'd sweat bullets getting right. History has taught me that in situations like that, fairness can go fuck itself; the truth is that the Coachella set's spirit of HOLY SHITness is - was - gone forever, and any attempt to revisit it in the future would involve slamming into an impenetrable wall of scenefuckers. C'est la vie, as our robot overlords might say.

But that's the negative interpretation of the night's events, which, as anyone who saw me that night can tell you, in no way reflected the sheer transplendence of the amazing time I had. I danced so recklessly that by the time we filed out I practically looked like I'd just been birthed; I honestly can't think of another instance in my life where I actually managed to sweat all the way through a pair of blue jeans, for god's sake. Can you blame me? Last Saturday might not have been Coachella, but that doesn't make it any less enthrallingly awesome to find yourself in a crowd of tens of thousands of folks singing along to "Face To Face" - I mean, Johnny-come-latelys or not, that's still an impressive song for a whole crowd of otherwise presumably dance-apathetic Americans to know every word by heart. And don't get me started on the encore (an item lacking from their Coachella performance in the sorest of ways); I'm trying not to spoil it for the two people I know who read this blog and have plans to see 'em in Seattle, but let's just say that it was more than a little awesome to hear them annihilating Thomas Bangalter's remixes to cap off the hour they'd just spent doing the same to their collective work. Seriously, don't even get me started.

And anyway, the most revealing aspect of the night was such an uncompromisingly positive one that it's hard for EVEN ME to dwell on the negativity, by which I mean the degree to which the show was sold out. By "sold out", I hasten to add that this wasn't one of those "sold out" shows where half the arena's simply blacked out - I mean every seat had an ass in it and every square inch of floor space had someone laying claim to it. I saw kids who must have been in elementary school when Discovery came out rocking Daft Punk shirts and losing their shit under parental supervision up in the seats. I saw tens of thousands of people become anthropomorphic shrieks when the light show started to extend from the pyramid to the walls of the Arena. I saw idiots who bolted for the door before the encore on the receiving end of the kind of glares normally reserved for people who cut in line at the DMV. In short, I saw one hell of a show which, despite not being as awesome as one of the very best things at which I've ever pointed my eyes in the twenty-six years I've spent on this planet so far, kicked a ton of ass and took a ton of names despite coming to the one place on earth best equipped to turn its nose up at the proceedings, and came away without a single reason to consider their tour anything other than the live show with the best chance of being viable until the principle figures shuffle on off this mortal coil. I do believe I can live with that. (Click here to buy Discovery from Amazon.com if for some inexplicable reason you've managed to live your empty little life without it to this point)

The Rakes, "We Danced Together" (SebastiAn remix) - I freely admit that I was actually more excited to see SebastiAn (and to a lesser extent Kavinsky)'s set than Daft Punk's; for one, I'd seen the latter's show before (did I mention that yet?), and for another, I hear SebastiAn absolutely breaks his foot off in his audience's ass. Sadly, as previously detailed, this simply wasn't the case last weekend due to the LA equivalent of a swarm of bridge-&-tunnel folk, although these people came predictably (and, to be fair, quite justifiably) alive at the sound of his remix of Rage Against The Machine's "Bulls On Parade". Still, his set did an admirable job of showcasing the brute force of his approach - even playing his song selections relatively safe for the benefit of those present who'd never heard of dancing before Pitchfork admitted to hopping on the good foot for "We Are Your Friends", he still managed to pick a lineup of songs with a throughline of uncompromising physicality; all of his technical shortcomings as a DJ (and I'm specifically referring to the relative gracelessness of some of his transitions) were handily overcome by his gift to pick songs which hit you in the sternum with full force. He actually never played his mix of "We Danced Together", presumably because it's a slow loping beast and the order of the evening was an unalloyed footrace into an electro-disco singularity, but much to my neighbors' dismay I've been listening to it a whole lot ever since anyway. The contrast between Force and Not Force laid so elegantly bare by that One Big Sweeping Swelling Dropout about a minute into the song simply serves as far too tempting an allegory for the contrast between when SebastiAn was behind the decks and when he, for lack of a more precise term, wasn't; if the twenty minutes he spent onstage with some dude pretending to be an undead hotrodder are any indication, I need to see him live in a more intimate, less douchebag-filled environment in the worstest of ways. Of course, I'm sure he'll just end up playing, like, Cinespace one Tuesday night, although even that way at least I'll still get half of what I want. (Click here to buy the "We Danced Together" CDS from Amazon)

Celestial Choir, "Stand on the Word" (Larry Levan remix) - And fuck it, as long as I'm throwing up stuff that everyone reading this has already heard eleventy billion times, I figure I might as well throw up THE GREATEST SONG IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, which Larry Levan's transcendent retooling of a gospel howler into an absolute weapon of ass destruction engineered to kick celebrations of secular debauchery into absolute overdrive. Oddly enough, this song seems to have gone at least formally uncanonized during the last few years' elevation of Levan from marginalized crusader into a full-stop canon-eradicating icon; I know it still gets dapped out by JD Twitch and Justice (seriously, if you can't hear the seeds of "D.A.N.C.E." in here, you wholeheartedly deserve the mediocrity to which you most assuredly attain), but "Stand on the Word" shows up on neither any of the last half-decade's Levan compilations nor even friggin' iTunes, and nobody on this world or any other has yet to give me a good reason as to why that might be. As such, it kinda feels like if this song is to survive - which it may well be doing; I may have never heard it at a club, but I freely admit that that and twenty bucks will get you a blowjob from a daytime hooker - it's got to do so on the strength of word of mouth, and I kinda like that; "Stand on the Word" is very much one of those songs which feels practically designed to be venerated as a sacred object, and the best way to go about that involves preaching to the choir, if you will. And I swear to anyone or anything to which you would ask me to swear that I'm not just posting this as an excuse to whip out my Cock of Wit - but you'll just have to give it a listen to make sure, won't you? (Juno somehow seems to have a few copies of this left in stock; I strongly urge you to click here and buy one.) (EDIT: Well, as usual I'm apparently an idiot; check the comments for details. I swear to you that Perpetua credited this to Levan when I copped it from Fluxblog eleven billion years ago, though. In any event, this in no way keeps me from calling it THE GREATEST SONG IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE.)

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)

YEP

And there was much rejoicing

It's difficult to know where to start with the events which led up to what can only be defined as the single most explosively joyous musical event I can remember in a good long while. I doubt, for instance, if I would have enjoyed it as much if I'd gone to Coachella as I'd planned, or if I hadn't found myself peeking out at the daylight from the other side of my first involvement with the law, or if my 2007 hadn't been tinted with interminable girl drama in roughly the same way that 12 Black Paintings are tinted with the color black, or or or. It's also possible, of course, that Monday night was simply an example of the truth to power inherent in Occam's Razor, and Justice simply really are that awesome.

Monday night was just one of those nights when the man upstairs decides to let you taste what it's like to get what you want. I'd been praying all week that the aforementioned character in the aforementioned flyer meant I'd finally get a chance to see Justice after like six months of people screaming and yelling about how the exasperating thoroughness with which they (or, rather, Xavier) rock a motherfucking party; turns out not only Ed Banger come complete and correct, but they brought their buddy Jesse from MSTRKRFT to boot; it also turned out that Guns 'N Bombs and Blake Miller and like everyone else who did so much as draw a breath on stage are just retardedly fun DJs, the likes of which you just don't get to see around LA all that much. Needless to say, the night would have been an unqualified success even if Justice decided to take the night off after (I hear) rocking the bejeezus out of Coachella; instead they decided to raze the dancefloor to the ground and salt the earth to make sure nobody else could lay claim to the crowd in attendance again for a motherfucking minute.

By now, of course, if you've ever read anyone write anything about Justice DJing anywhere ever, you know precisely what to expect from a description of their act: Gaspard making murderously sly asides to the crowd, Xavier's unassuming ninja-assassin nature behind the decks, indelibly cheeky song choices (guess what? French folx know how to use "Da Funk" to even greater effect than non-French folx!), "We Are Your Friends" catapulting literally every person on the dancefloor several feet off the ground (although segueing into the synth line from "Call Me Al" was a particularly inspired touch if I do say so myself), etc. Of course, I walked into the Ex_Plx (ugh, PICK ONE BETTER NAME FOR ONE CLUB, LOS ANGELES) feeling eminantly well-schooled on the subject and still got flattened by the steamroller they were driving; part of me wants to reach through the internet and grab you by the ears and be all OH MY GOD THERE'S THIS SONG ABOUT NEVER BEING ALONE AGAIN even though you all probably copped it off of Matthew Perpetua three years ago just like me. They are absolutely as good as advertised, if not better, which is pretty insane considering the hype.

But taking a step back, their awesomeness was almost incidental to the night - well, okay, that's not even close to true, but there is a bigger picture which probably ought to engender that creeping, venomous jealousy everyone with a blog hopes to inspire in their readers, namely that it wasn't just Justice onstage - it was damn near everybody involved with Ed Banger, tagging on and off the decks whenever they felt like spelling themselves, jumping on the mic to howl along with the hooks, feeding off each others' energy - to say nothing of the crowd's, which could have powererd a small- to mid-sized metropolis by night's endd - like you wouldn't believe. I've spent this space before talking about how when you get down to brass tacks, I really just want to hear music that sounds like whoever put it together had a fuckload of fun doing it; well, by that criteria the Ed Banger crew put on literally the ideal show for me to see, even if it only involved them standing around on stage watching Xavier ignore the no-smoking rules and beat the crowd half to death (HAVE I MENTIONED THAT HE'S PRETTY GOOD AT DJING). By the time I left, there were probably close to thirty people onstage; everyone who'd gone on first just kept wandering up either to marvel at the sight of a completely unhinged Ed Banger happening in the middle of actually happening or to look out from their vantage point at that rarest of sights: a crowd full of Los Angeles hipsters coming absolutely, resolutely, irreparably unglued. Which reason got them onstage didn't even matter; they just kept staying and getting more and more into it, to the point where Steve Aoki - Steve Aoki - was leaping around like an insane person, throwing shirts into the crowd and pumping his fist and generally acting in a manner most unbefitting a DJ responsible for literally hundreds of peoples' appearances on Blue States Lose.

The Ex_Plx (again, ugh) has a couple of columns dividing the front part of the room in front of the stage from the back part with the big bar and the seats and the etc; maneuvering through them on my way out the door, I noticed that the back part, comprising nearly two-thirds of the space in the club, was relatively sparsely populated and disarmingly blase. Had I not just born witness to inarguably the single most inspiring musical performance since Daft Punk at Coachella the year before - and keep in mind that this includes at the very least one hell of a show by the Knife - I would have undoubtedly be in jail right now for murdering every single person too cool for the front of that room; sometimes you see people wasting opportunities and you just want to start stab them until the voices in your head tell you to stop. By now, of course, I'm far more sanguine about things; I realize that these poor deluded retarded idiots were only cheating themselves, because an opportunity to take part in a shared paroxysm of unbridled exuberance like that doesn't come around more than a couple of times per life. Forget all the stuff about seeing them in a tiny little club or completely free from pressures surrounding their appearance or whatever: those ridiculous assfaces cheated themselves right out of a chance to watch the coolest cool-kids on the planet kick back and take pleasure in their ability to do things their way, even six thousand miles away from their home turf. Hopefully the world affords them a chance to correct their error; even if they're too cool to take advantage, I most emphatically and certainly am not.

So yeah, that was pretty fun.

The Moths, "Games" - I will completely admit to being a mark of the most shameful caliber for whoever writes the ad copy for Rough Trade; they seem to have hired the most expert safecracker on the planet when it comes to convincing me to spend money on a few specific varieties of modern British indie rock. I really don't know why I give them so much power - lord knows I've got my share of unbelievably shitty records collecting dust on my shelves right now which wouldn't be there but for Rough Trade's enthusiastic endorsement - but man, if we're going to be speaking on the subject of Things Paying Off in general this post, they're practically the alpha and omega. The Moths, for instance, saw some enterprisingly exploitative shop clerk tag their debut single "Moths" see fit simply to describe their particular brand of, quote, "electro-punk", endquote, as being appreciably possessing of, quote, "corking tunes", by which point the record was already in my cart and the matter had become a non-issue. Luckily for me, whoever that dude (or vagina-having-dude) was, they sure got it right; "Games" is a motherfucking monster of a debut single, the kind of song which almost makes one thankful for the Killers' existance if only due to the bright light their continued success shines on the viability of synthpop mixed with loudness. That's not to say the Killers sound anything like the Moths or vice versa; the Moths seem to be making absolutely no effort to earn the right to their rock-and-or-roll signifiers, instead choosing to brashly assume that they've got the right to use disarmingly simple, obliviatingly unoriginal (seriously, does anyone on earth still consider a chorus like "ALLJUSTAGAMEINMYHEAD!" to be untrodden ground?) musical strategies like weapons, which works out pretty well in the end since the song they made out of 'em fucking ROCKS. This is urgently reccomended stuff for anyone who enjoyed the Video Nasties or the Klaxons; one can never have too much Loud or Fun in one's life. (Click here to buy the "Games" EP from Rough Trade)

Deaf Stereo, "Youth In Movement" - While I'm speaking of "well-trod ground", here's this. Sometimes I get kinda antsy about describing music as being old hat, mostly because the music I'm describing as such simply has the misfortune of falling under one of the squillion musical idia over which I obsessed; I wholeheartedly support the right of the member of any band described thusly to get as butthurt over the effects of my experience as a consumer, and ask merely that they remember that they're most assuredly getting laid off their music more than I am from saying "Eh" at it. Besides, sometimes it's the familiar path which etc etc temple of knowledge etc etc downward-facing dog etc etc and then the baby looked at me; Deaf Stereo's "Youth In Movement", for instance, is steeped in familiar and not-entirely-welcome signifiers (Interpol, the Automatic, Kaiser Chiefs, basically everything mentioned even in passing in 24 Hour Party People) , and yet I keep catching myself playing it every few days if just to bask in their enthusiasm for the formula. It's one thing, after all, when a band goes through rote gestures of successful songwriting like the ones on display in "Youth In Movement" just because they don't want to wear a tie to work, but it's something else entirely when there's such a tangible level of commitment to the song itself as you get on a track like this - as catchy as the chorus is - and on the surface alone, we're already at catastrophic levels of catchiness - the thing that makes it stick in my head is the way every single guy in the band seems to be howling along in the background at the top of their lungs, like they're all trying to prove that they really would in fact appreciate seeing the youth in movement. I can only hope that when the time comes for them to make something more professional-sounding, they don't give the studio wizards a free hand to make something else out of their energy other than what's already there; one would be tempted to describe it as "more than enough" if such a category for describing musical energy existed. (Click here to buy the "Youth In Movement" single from Rough Trade)

Universal Robot Band, "Dance And Shake Your Tamborine" (JD Twitch Blame It On Vic Funk edit) - A bit of a left turn from the joyously aggro tone of everything else mentioned in this post, yes, but given the sheer amount of playtime I've found myself devoting to this magnificent remix courtesy of JD Twitch (i.e. That Dude Who Refuses To Come To Los Angeles, Presumably Due To Lingering Beef With Suge Knight). Anyone who's read this blog for more than a minute knows full well that a song only needs to posess so much inherent warmth before I can't keep myself from running off to the internet and stealing it for everyone; please believe me when I say that this is VERY VERY VERY VERY MUCH one of those songs, to the point where even the obvious zeal behind whichever member of the Universal Robot Band was responsible for that zig-zagging synth which intermittantly goes gently slashing through the track kinda stands out for sounding hands-off by comparison, which is fucking nuts. My favorite Optimo-related track is/was/forever will be Twitch's remix of Richie Havens' "Going Back To My Roots", but this isn't far off, and it's not of a particularly dissimilar character; those of you with a weakness for euphorically luxuriant disco music are urged to click the download link immediately and start clearing room in your schedules. Do it now before the song does it for you. (I cannot for the life of me find anyone selling this record, but please visit the Optimo website and start clicking on shit if you want more music like this.)

Elsewhere:

- THREE NEW GEO METROS!