nerdbound denies this, but he’s basically a huge Pitchfork whore.  Oh, don’t worry, he doesn’t read the reviews — nothing that horrific.  But he checks their Best New Music section religiously and listens to everything they jam down his throat.  Just like a whore.  Except that whores typically favor a different sense for things jammed down their throats.

So when it came time for the 2008 Pitchfork Readers Poll, what choice did we have but to throw in our meager opinions to be swallowed by this communal pool of trenchant hipster wisdom?  Enjoy this capsule look at our general opinion of 2008, and expect a full list of the year’s top albums and underrated releases closer towards the end of the year.

Favorite Albums

nerdbound

1. Deerhunter – Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
2. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
3. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes / Sun Giant
   
4. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
5. NOMO – Ghost Rock

ninjajabberwocky

1. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
2. Deerhunter – Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
3. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
4. Air France – No Way Down
5. Apollo Sunshine – Shall Noise Upon

Favorite Songs

nerdbound

1. Deerhunter – “Nothing Ever Happened”
2. TV on the Radio – “Golden Age”
3. Gang Gang Dance – “Saint Dymphna”
4. Cut Copy – “Lights and Music”
5. Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

ninjajabberwocky

1. TV on the Radio – “Golden Age”
2. Deerhunter – “Nothing Ever Happened”
3. Cut Copy – “Lights and Music”
4. Weezer – “Pork and Beans”
5. Air France – “Collapsing at Your Doorstep”

Favorite Live Act

nerdbound: Deerhunter

ninjajabberwocky: Boris

Best New Artist

nerdbound & ninjajabberwocky: Fleet Foxes

Most Overrated Album

nerdbound & ninjajabberwocky: MGMT – Oracular Spectacular

Underrated Album

nerdbound: Plants and Animals – Parc Avenue

ninjajabberwocky: The Dø – A Mouthful

Favorite Reunited Act

nerdbound & ninjajabberwocky: My Bloody Valentine

Look, I have finals going on right now, so there’s no way that I can really make a review right now that does justice to how great this is. In fact, this album is already interfering with my finals because I keep putting it on when I’m supposed to be working and drifting away listening to it. If I flunk all my classes, at least I get to be sublimely happy while doing it.

A brief history of Deerhunter: They release a debut album that is harsh and unfriendly. Nobody notices. They experience a bunch of in-band tension and nearly do not release their second album. What is eventually released, 2007′s Cryptograms, comes from a couple of different sessions and varies wildly in style and aim. The first half alternates between long ambient meditations and hard-as-nails post-punk where the band locks into a killer groove. The second half is largely psychedelic pop. Pitchfork loved it, and, after many many listens attempting to understand it, so did I. But it’s a hard album to listen to because of its enormous stylistic variance and the fact that it’s easy to feel a little… bored by the white noise noodling. A lot of people just heard it and went “WTF?” That said, “Cryptograms”, “Octet” are perfect, and many other songs are absolutely riveting and sound totally fresh. The band also got a reputation for their weird live shows in which the frontman, Bradford Cox, would show up in women’s clothing and discuss his feelings and… Deerhunter followed this album with the Fluorescent Grey EP, which lacks any of the ambient noodling and has a few good songs in its short length. Pitchfork and I love it too.

Bradford Cox has been spending most of this year doing solo work under his moniker Atlas Sound. The 2008 release Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel is a good album, but IMO not as good as his Deerhunter work (although some love it more). It certainly lacks the confusing lack-of-centeredness of Cryptograms and has a number of good pop songs, but lacks the awesome grooves that come from having a band.

My co-blogger and I had the privilege of seeing Atlas Sound live when they came to Stanford campus. We were both favorably impressed, and I liked his album more afterwards. He let his songs be less ambient and more dance-y because that was what the crowd wanted, and that displayed the pop hooks underlying them to great effect. I also got the impression that Bradford Cox is awesome: There is a story involved. Atlas Sound was going to open for the Breeders at a festival the next weekend, so Bradford was wearing a Breeders T-shirt. My co-blogger was wearing a Pixies tee. So of course, Bradford called him on it. He asked the crowd which was better (we thought it was the Pixies, to his dismay. We were also right) and challenged my co-blogger to an arm-wrestling competition. Any discussion of this arm-wrestling match would be incomplete if it didn’t mention a) that (from what I understand) Bradford is gay, cross-dresses for shows, and said that the arm-wrestling match would determine who was the more masculine (yay subversion!) and b) has Marfan syndrome, a disease which (I believe) makes him look a bit strange and stops him from having much muscle.

My co-blogger let him win for a moment, but then crushed him. We talked to him a bit after the show and he was really cool.

So up until I heard this album, I liked the band but their recorded output all left me unfulfilled. Cryptograms was too hard to love, Grey was too short, and Blind lacked the band and rock tendencies. Nevertheless, I was convinced that Deerhunter was AWESOME and had tons of potential. They have now proved me right. This album is Deerhunter at their tightest.

The new album is far more immediate than any of their past work. This can be seen through the production, which is much brighter and up-front, and the music which finally captures their sound. They describe themselves as ambient punk, but this is the first time that those two completely different styles of music have come together so well. Songs still vary quite a bit from the more ambient to the more psychedelic pop to the more punk but they now all sound like the same band. Part of that comes from the excellent sequencing. The first third is more pop-oriented. It slides from there into a more ambient middle section. Unlike Cryptograms though, every song is short and sweet and has a pop hook somewhere. Frankly, each of the short songs in the middle is absolutely gorgeous, shocking me every time I hear them. Finally, just before the ambient music becomes too much to take the guitars hit HARD and you’re thrust into “Nothing Ever Happened,” and the more raucus final third. But even at their most rock-oriented, you can hear their ambient textures which mean that these rock songs continually change and never get old. You hear them a second time and notice a little bit more of the subtext, the hidden sounds, the sort of little Easter eggs which are always there in truly great music.

So now I’ll just mention a few highlights. “Nothing Ever Happened” is probably my favorite, with its awesome guitar soloing, and solid groove. But “Little Kids” is a close second: It returns more to the themes and style of Blind and is absolutely transcendent. By which I actually mean that it sounds kinda spiritual in its lifting-upwards of innocence, increasingly submerged in static. “These Hands” is a brilliant little shoegaze track. It uses some beautiful textures: what sound like strings but might not be, underlining vocal wails and guitar noise. “Agorophobia” is also great: It’s more like psychedelic pop, but is more driving than typical for such music. “Never Stops” and “Saved By Old Times” both rock pretty damn hard, while still having great pop hooks, and “Twilight at Carbon Lake” is a beautiful drifting closer, which feels like it’s going to float away before the guitars come crashing in for the shoegaze-esque (reminding me of Ride) finale.

It’s a wonderful thing to listen to a record that is this good. You can stream some tracks at their Myspace.

9.7/10

posted by nerdbound

Describing the music is tough. It’s folk music: not 60′s-style folk music, but something older. Of current artists, it most reminds me of Califone, Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, etc. Kinda folk music with a bit more rock influence than any of the acts mentioned before (although still not very much rock as such… As I say, it’s hard to describe. But it’s definitely livelier). While Califone and Grizzly Bear often sound fractured and muted, Fleet Foxes even at their quiet moments sound like they’re winning. It’s very spiritual-sounding music, in the old “Simple Gifts” sense. Their MySpace calls it “baroque harmonic pop jams.” Not too bad, actually.

Honestly, what they remind me of most (emotionally, not at all stylistically) is Nirvana’s live acoustic cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” That’s kinda a bizarre reference, I’m aware, but the two are similar in that both artists seem to believe that they’re something powerful (as opposed to merely ‘pretty’ or ‘personal’) in old folk music classics, and they bring out that power. It’s emotional music, and not always happy music, but it’s never whiney music because it’s not about the personal emotions of the artist. It’s about the emotions of the artist’s culture, the collective unconscious. It grafts a connection between the listener and some much bigger shit.

Many of their songs (such as “Blue Ridge Mountains”) alternate between soft, weary, nearly a cappella parts and big, ridiculously happy parts with the whole band. The emotional tension between the two styles is a lot of what makes the songs work so well. It makes the ‘sad’ here sound more like ‘ loss and redemption’ than ‘emo’ and the ‘happy’ more like ‘at one with the birds’ than… well, however ‘happy’ is usually defined.

I actually like the Sun Giant EP a bit more than Ragged Wood. It’s a little artier, has a couple of amazing hooks, and is (of course, given its shorter running time) more consistent. As of now,”Mykonos” is my favorite Fleet Foxes song, due largely to its unusual song structure. It starts as a big, happy tune that slowly breaks apart, before voices enter a capella in the middle with what could be a totally different song. The drum sound is fantastic, and both sections have great hooks. It’s kinda like having two songs in one, but the two sections play off each other in interesting ways. “Drops in the River” and “English House” are also fantastic.

That said, Ragged Wood is the greater achievement. Every song on it is a success. “Ragged Wood” and “Quiet Houses” are big and exciting, and probably my favorite (given my rarely downbeat mood). “Ragged Wood,”like “Mykonos,” sounds like several songs in one, with hooks galore. At least two or three guitar parts that are beautifully combined with the vocal melodies: in parts, it really swings too. “White Winter Hymnal” wins the contest for most memorable hook, a big circling choral bit; while “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and “Meadowlark” are just gorgeous in their simplicity. “He Doesn’t Know Why” and “Heard Them Stirring” sound like they’re going stratospheric.

I could literally praise every song here individually. No two are alike, and none fails.

9.1/10

posted by nerdbound

So I’m going to jot down my top albums of the year. There are a few caveats. For one, this was one of the strongest years in recent memory for metal, yet I did not get much metal onto this list. My listening habits have changed, and metal releases that would ordinarily have enthralled me seemed more distant this year. Additionally, the year was so strong for independent rock, that even fantastic metal releases did not make the cut.

Further, this is all just my opinion, and my opinion is biased by a love of experimental shit and angry motherfuckers. There’s a variety of stuff here, including some pretty twee pop, but that’s the exception not the rule. Of course, I would argue that I’m right to enjoy experimental and badass music. But some people don’t and they should not hate me for this.

Without further ado…

30. Jens Lekman — Night Falls Over Kortedala

TWEE. But I don’t hate it, which means that if you’re the right sort of person, this is your album of the year. This album was not made for me, or for people even vaguely like me (death to capitalism! jk), but I can still appreciate it for its craftsmanship and the little pop moments that hit me with hooks which affect me even as I groan…

29. Deerhunter — Cryptograms

I gather that the history of the record explains its total inconsistency of mood and sound. The record was done in a couple recording sessions, each with very different goals. The first half of the record alternates between hard-hitting experimental rock and ambient noise. The second half sounds like gentle psychedelic rock. Anyway, the fact that the album is a mess does not prevent its being brilliant. The Fluorescent Grey EP is even better, actually (I didn’t put EP’s on this list), but this has “Cryptograms” and “Octet,” their best songs. I’m really looking forward to more from these guys, because I feel like with a bit more consistency, this would be my favorite record. Although, actually, I’m not sure if they want to make records with more consistency, or if they want to make my favorite record. Still, whatever they do next is going to be cool.

28. Blitzen Trapper — Wild Mountain Nation

A whirlwind trip through a bunch of different styles. Eclectic and always interesting, it’s hard to say what about it makes it a success other than that it continually surprises you with a new trick. It’s just a band getting together and sounding like they’re having a lot of fun and have kinda forgotten if they’re aping Pixies or Southern rock. Sweet.

27. Bon Iver — For Emma, Forever Ago

Superficial analysis: It’s acoustic folk music with the loneliness jacked up to 11. It echoes a lot. The falsetto vocals are haunting. Pretty melodies galore. But no, seriously, it’s one of the few albums that reminds me of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon without the comparison immediately making me laugh.

26. Sunset Rubdown — Random Spirit Lover

The first 4-5 tracks are pretty standard indie pop. Higher quality than you might expect, really catchy, but they’re not phenomenal. Then things start getting really weird. The music takes off, gaining a dream-like quality and forgetting itself and its limitations. The arrangements cease making any sense at all, instruments break the flow in surprising ways, and yet by doing so create a greater flow, an overarching sense of… mystery? Only, it’s all, like, in march time. Um… I don’t really understand this album, but it’s definitely good…

25. Radiohead — In Rainbows

Duh. “All I Need” and “Reckoner” would be enough by themselves to put this on the list. I will not try to say anything about Radiohead.

24. Jay-Z — American Gangster

Again, I’m seriously unqualified to talk about Jay-Z. All I know is that this record’s pretty catchy. Makes me smile.

23. The Besnard Lakes — The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse

This one has jumped all over my list, from the bottom to the top and down and up… Here’s the problem: It’s phenomenally memorable, with moments that are just brilliant, and I keep finding myself going back to it. Also, a lot of its awesomeness is due to really long arcs: crescendos to enormous climaxes. That’s all very cool. But I’ve got enough musical ADD that I feel my mind fighting the artists, wanting those brilliant moments a little sooner than they happen. The tension built up here can be phenomenal, and I’m going “RELEASE, DAMN IT”. Of course, that means that when it finally explodes, it’s sublime. Anyway, music this good deserves a more patient listener than me.

22. Yeasayer — All Hour Cymbals

The closest thing the year had to a new release by TV on the Radio. They got the whole ‘world music + indie rock’ thing down, and they sound fuckin’ celebratory and spiritual. It’s a strangely relaxing album too, despite a strange kind of tension running through it. The highs here are extraordinarily high. “Get in the Sunrise” and “2080″ are shockingly good.

21. Panda Bear — Person Pitch

You have to listen to this record multiple times. I listened to it at least three times with it falling completely cold each time before it even started to open up to me. It’s still a tough record for me to parse. But I’m now officially in love with the first four tracks, and not just individually, but the way they flow together. I’ve actually tried to listen to “I’m Not” before and failed to enjoy it, but it always makes sense following “Bros”. This is another record which I feel suffers unfairly due to my lack of patience… But I enjoy the challenge.

20. Burial — Untrue

Just listened to this on a plane. It’s such fantastic travel music, although the noise from the plane interfered with it a little. Really, it’s walking music, for late at night. It’s like the sound of lonely voices in the rain. Darkness and uncertainty reign. But when I say it like that, I think of what darkness meant for pre-moderns: Think big predators and muscular men doing battle. This is about darkness in the modern world: There’s nothing to fear, really, except that you won’t ever meet someone to love you back.

19. Menomena — Friend and Foe

The music here is bursting with ideas. The piano line in “Wet and Rusting”. All the horns. And “Evil Bee”, which is the standout track. Each track develops in a really weird way, due to the method of song construction: Everything is a loop which gets turned on or off. What other elements are present in the music recontextualizes each line, so that sometimes you hear a musical tune, and then it’s repeated, sounding entirely different. Creative as fuck.

18. Parts and Labor — Mapmaker

A friend of mine listened to this and said that it was too ‘post-something’, a little unsure what it was post-. I kinda have to agree, while still noting that I love the album. “Fractured Skies” pretty much captures the album: It’s fractured and disoriented, but always looking up. Drums are fast and furious, and the whole band sounds like they’re having a great time doing whatever it is they’re doing. And somehow there’s nothing cooler than a band that sounds like they’re making up what it means to be a band as they go along.

17. Les Savy Fav — Let’s Stay Friends

A great rock album, which is surprisingly universal for a band which I usually think of as a fringe indie Fugazi-aping sort of band. Great pop melodies anchored by strong rhythm work and guitars. “Patty Lee” is the best track here, with its ringing guitar line, but it’s all pretty consistent.

16. Holy Fuck — LP

I could swear I’ve heard this before, not because it sounds like other music, but because it’s the sound my id makes. Seriously, there’s something really primal about this music. Which makes sense, as I guess all their music is improvised and then edited. They just grab a bunch of keyboards and noise generators and see what happens. I kinda really want to see these guys live now (and they are coming to San Francisco! With A Place to Bury Strangers!). Anyway, the sound is raw and powerful and makes me want to beat on my desk whenever I hear it. That and “Lovely Allen” is fantastically beautiful.

15. The Shocking Pinks — Shocking Pinks

A great laid-back, slacker sort of album. Reminds me of Pavement classics like “Here,” and like Pavement, the album is very varied. There’s some light shoegaze influence too, and I gather that they do a bunch of dance stuff too, which is why they’re running with the DFA. But that isn’t largely what’s on this album, which is fantastic comfort music even when it surprises. The singer’s voice is really… warm, contrasting with the often icy (and occasionally confrontational) guitars. I don’t usually enjoy albums that sound like they’re about the singer’s sad sad feelings, y’know? So the fact that I like this one definitely argues in its favor: It’s emotional without being morose.

14. Muscles — Guns Babes Lemonade

“Sweaty” is easily one of my favorite tracks of the year. I can easily expound for quite some time on just how good I think it is. Its use of dissonance and vocal harmonies is absolutely unique. But anyway, the whole album is full of joy and hurray. It’s a gigantic celebration of good things like ice cream, unity, and love. Glorying in its own dumbness and maximalism, it’s easy to miss how smart it is. I’ve been noticing more and more people talking about how criticism is overrated: What’s underrated is appreciating good things for their good bits. This album is like that, reminding us that no matter how smart we may be, we still like happy things, and that’s damn cool.

13. Kanye West — Graduation

No filler. Kanye’s easy to like. There’s nothing very deep here to discuss, but there shouldn’t be either. Just a bunch of singles that are enjoyable and occasionally shockingly good. “Flashing Lights” is a masterpiece in my opinion, although others prefer other tracks here. But I haven’t found anyone who doesn’t like something about this music. Universal in the best sense of the word.

12. Iron & Wine — The Shepherd’s Dog

I never much liked Iron & Wine: I had kinda lumped them in with all the many bands that are trying to do more and more acoustic folk music than anyone could ever need. But here, they sound like they got a band together and decided to experiment with a breadth of cultural and musical influences that I did not expect. Unlike a lot of folk music, it doesn’t sound generic, and doesn’t sound ‘pleasant.’ It goes places, sees things, enjoys itself. I’m gonna have to go back and listen to their older material and see if I like it more. Regardless, this is good stuff.

11. Animal Collective — Strawberry Jam

Speaking of bands where I did not always enjoy their older material (although here for the opposite reasons)… I always respected Animal Collective, but never really loved them. Insert a generic statement or two here about how when bands try to be experimental, sometimes their experiments don’t work. Seriously, these guys are all over the place, with “Banshee Beat,” some great pop songs, and a lot of WTF. But this album is a cohesive statement with new inventions like intelligible lyrics. And I totally connect with it, especially songs like “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks.” Nor is the album a cop-out to accessibility: It’s only accessible relative to Animal Collective, but is still doing something radically new.

10. Liars — Liars

Liars sound different on every record, but have been pretty consistently brilliant. Here they sound like an angrier Jesus and Mary Chain, who are very in right now (Scarlett Johansson sang with them during their reunion, The Magnetic Fields are trying to sound like them, I’m about to reference them again 5 albums down the list, etc.). But they don’t just sound like the JAMC, they also sound like themselves, and that means that they are pissed off, and beating tribal drums, and making layers of cacophonous dadaist noise. Frankly, the newest thing to their sound on this album is not the occasional JAMC-aping bit and murky production, but the revelation that they can be laid-back a la “Houseclouds,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Protection.” That and the badass “Clear Island”, which I have a serious crush on.

9. Future of the Left — Curses

“Violence solved everything” is the mission statement of this album. Violence is the modus operandi: Shock the listener with that great post-punk sense of disorientation. Something is not right. Solving everything is perhaps an overstatement, but solving SOMEthing, that’s the goal. There are people who don’t want things to be solved, hence the violence, but don’t doubt the good intentions. These guys sound like total assholes, but they’re assholes because they have to conflict with the rest of mankind to make things better. Well, I’m not sure about that really. Maybe it’s more a rationalization than a rationale. Not important. The point is that this is a catchy-as-fuck glorification of violence and everything bad for you. Did I mention that it’s really funny? And wants to fuck capitalism? Of course I love this.

8. El-P — I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

This album is a masterpiece of production fitting the mood. The artist wants you to feel paranoid and tense. So he makes a record that is abrasive and cacophonous and messy. It makes sense, but no one has done it quite like this, and it’s not what I expect from hip-hop, where often production is squeaky clean. This album is fucked up. Funny too. But mostly fucked up. “Habeas Corpses” “I found love on a prison ship” “go on a raping spree” fucked up. Sometimes things are better, sometimes they’re worse, but they’re inevitably going to Hell in the long run. A beautiful sort of sentiment.

7. LCD Soundsystem — Sound of Silver

This is a hard one to place on a list because it’s so uneven. “Someone Great” and “All My Friends” are clear classics, and among the best songs of the year. Other tracks (especially “Get Innocuous”) are great. But still other tracks are just not that special. Without the two tracks mentioned at the beginning of this review, the album would be nothing at all. But I’m not rating that album, I’m rating an album that includes those two tracks, and any album like that is going to stand the test of time.

6. Electrelane — No Shouts No Calls

This album is so underrated, it’s obscene. Electrelane here totally step out from the shadow of Stereolab and create a masterpiece of little moments: Simplicity and beauty are contrasted with droning guitar work in surprising ways. This is easily the most feminine album on the list, and it’s a deep embarrassment to me that I like it as much as I do. But shit, “In Berlin” is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Usually, I hear a piece where singers sing “You are all that I love/You are all that I need/You are all that I long for…” and other plaintive lines and think ‘oh, music for Jr. High girls to masturbate to. Cool.’ At best, I think ‘not for me, but I could see how someone else would like it.’ Not here. Here, I have to admit that I really want to fall in love with the singer.

I think that the reason is that the album perfectly mixes the desires of each gender. There’s some research out there somewhere indicating that women love melodies, and guys love harmony and rhythm. The Stereolab/rock influence means that there’s harmony and rhythm and always something interesting going on here, but the melodies are gorgeous too. And the album confuses what exactly the melody/harmony is, with many interlocking melodies and sections. So anyway, the result is that I like it for a feminist reason that’s better (I hope) than ‘see, women can rock too’. Music is male-dominated, but I feel this album provides a glimpse into what a gender-neutral music world might look like. And it’s a damn good world.

5. A Place to Bury Strangers — A Place to Bury Strangers

When shoegaze happened in the 90′s, it was actually kinda punk. It’s really hard to remember that: I tend to remember Loveless and think of beautiful pop melodies hidden behind layers of static and huge production budgets. Most of the people doing neo-shoegaze today seem to remember shoegaze much like I do (hell, see Blonde Redhead below), forgetting the Isn’t Anything‘s of the world. But A Place to Bury Strangers are not just punk, they’re fucking metal! They’re fucking industrial! They’ve got a pop melody in there somewhere, for sure. But the obscuring static is not beautiful lush static, it’s pummeling static that will break you like a twig. I think it was Pitchfork that mentioned Ministry, and I have to agree that that’s the reference to make. Really, the Jesus and Mary Chain would be the primary influence, except that where JAMC merely shock and awe, this shit kills.

If this were a list of what music this year excited me the most, this would win by far. It’s their debut, though, so I’ll get to hear a lot more from them, which excites me to no end. If they grow from here, they’re going to become one of my favorite bands ever. Even if this is their high water mark, I still fucking love it. “To Fix the Gash in Your Head” is my most-listened track of the year (by far) because it has both depth and immediacy. The first breakdown into static and destruction is so powerful, it blows my mind every time I listen to it. It makes me want to dance a kind of nihilistic death dance. Fuck yeah.

4. !!! — Myth Takes

This album’s pop hooks immediately made it one of my most-listened albums of the year. Before “Myth Takes”, I had been used to the idea that !!! were bad at making albums: Always too much filler — a few shockingly good singles and a bunch of trash. This album changes all that. While “Heart of Hearts” and “Yadnus” are powerful dance tracks, “Must Be the Moon” and “A New Name” are pure pop, “All My Heroes Are Weirdos” has become something of an anthem for me (as might be guessed from the title), and “Bend Over Beethoven” is simply one of the best things that !!! have ever done.

The music has gone through the full pop music trajectory for me. At first, it was new music, and thus the simple hooks were exciting. Then, it was familiar music, and the depth and details of the tracks made me happy. Eventually, I had overplayed everything, and the hooks seemed distant instead of primal and immediate. The shocking thing, though, is that even now, I hear new things every time I listen. !!! are fucking smart, so each line, each hook, each detail, appeals not only to the body but also to the brain. Thus, they have succeeded at what they have always been trying to do: Making really intelligent music glorifying idiocy and good times. It’s the sonic equivalent of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, where “Be excellent to each other and party on dudes!” becomes the founding insight upon which all of our future society will be based. Yeah, that’s a stoner mentality. But what else would form the basis of a utopia? Stupidity can be smart, and here !!! put that theory into practice.

3. Blonde Redhead — 23

This album redefines the word over-produced. Every human element seems secondary to the creation of a beautiful atmosphere, a perfect sonic universe. I can see why Pitchfork ignored it. Its artistic project is so different from most music. But it succeeds: It creates something so beautiful that it’s jaw-dropping. It’s no Loveless but it definitely begs the comparison in both production values and in the sense that it’s creating something where Art transcends the merely human. It’s not Loveless because it’s not as deep: It’s all surfaces, immediate impressions, hooks…

I hate making Loveless comparisons by the way: shoegaze was more than that one album goddammit. But I mention it here because I feel like Blonde Redhead were actually trying for that: Previous albums were looser and punker. This is an attempt to make a fucking statement. And it’s gorgeous and moving.

2. Shining — Grindstone

Weirdest album of the year. Yay. Utterly unique. In a nutshell, it’s a record that understands both the appeal and the joke of metal. Because it understands the appeal, it includes big jarring riffs, drama, buildups, tension, etc. Because it understands the joke, it includes little jazzy piano and bell interludes, and sometimes lets the tension release in ways that deliberately fall flat just for fun. Reminds me of what Kant has to say about the sublime. No joke, but I’m not going to talk about pretentious bullshit here, I swear. Anyway, it basically always works, which is more than you can say of 99% of prog records, and 99.999% of records which think they have a musical sense of humor.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything else that I could compare favorably to early Boredoms, but mostly because I can’t think of much else that I would compare to early Boredoms. This album makes me wonder if there’s more space there than I thought for music to deal with emotions like immaturity and bombast without falling flat. On my first few listens, it was the first three tracks that I loved best, because they were relatively straightforwardly exciting. Now, though, I’m increasingly drawn to “Psalm”. What an amazing piece of music. But every listen to the album reveals the reason why some track I used to find forgettable is there. They’re all so fucking deep, and there’s little I like more than being deep about immaturity.

1. Of Montreal — Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

It’s my album of the year, but explaining why is difficult due to its sheer obviousness. It’s a great pop album with copious musical creativity. And it’s a shitload of fun: Melodies that stick with you, lots of rhythmic action, etc. But it’s more than that. A couple reasons why: First, the music isn’t just about relationships, drugs, religion, and everything else, it’s also consistently clever about such topics. It has a point of view, and is unafraid to share it (“oh, the church is filled with losers / psycho or confused!”) and the views make a bit of sense. I saw an interview with Kevin Barnes where (I forget exactly what he said) he talked about wanting pop music that’s more daring to advocate new lifestyles and such. I mean, the dude performed naked. What I’m trying to say is that the music is consistent in its worldview: It wants you to use love and relationships and whatever else to achieve fulfillment in defiance of tradition. And that’s a fucking cool worldview: Neither the pussy free love of the hippies or the confrontational fuck-you hate of the punks. Empowering.

Second, there’s “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” 12 minutes of the singer overcome with tension and sadness making vague allusions to art as he describes how his relationship fell apart. Has to be heard to be believed, but it works. The lyrics hit really hard, and the music prevents any emotional release until the very end. A few samples of brilliance: “The sun is out / It melts the snow that fell yesterday / Makes you wonder / Why it bothered.” (Beautiful metaphor for a relationship that’s over.) “It’s so embarrassing to need someone like I need you / How can I explain? / I need you here / And not here too.” “We want our film to be beautiful / Not realistic.” The rest of it is similarly brilliant. Maybe even more so, in context. And its charisma carries it.

But mostly, the great thing about the album is that every song sounds like what other albums wish their singles could sound like. Tracks that I didn’t love on first listen are better than I thought. Tracks I loved on first listen are better than I thought. Everything works. Creativity is present in everything: the lyrics, songcraft, and performance. Don’t get put off by the squeaky vocals, like I was at first, and it’ll blow your fucking mind.

The music uses synthesizers, but the memorable compositional thing is the use of vocals: Background voices yelp and glide at high pitches, with nothing close to ‘good’ singing technique; calls are responded to; vocal bits circle in and out of the mix; and the frontman yells his heart out at the top of the mix, sounding like he’s continually exhausted but orgasming. It’s so charismatic that it almost hides the artistic worth of the underlying material. And yeah, after all that discussion of the music’s mood and fun, I do need to mention that it’s seriously artistically valid. Jarringly so, in fact: You can tell it’s an indie-sort of record by the fact that things like ‘harmony’ are often seemingly ignored: Willful dissonance is not often associated with dance music, but here it’s brilliantly done. And as I say, the sheer charisma means you might not notice.

The best track is “Sweaty”. It’s hard to mention all the stuff that this track does right. The big shit is obvious: Both ‘peace, love’ etc. and a big refrain about holding hands with someone special are used successfully and will not make you barf. It’s unbelievably charismatic. And you could hypothetically dance to it, although it has totally the wrong emotional content and comes off as unbelievably irritating on the first listen… Anyway, the details are awesome too: Somewhere deep in the mix are tinkling synths waiting to be loved. And it’s SO dissonant. I love the way that the voices speak naturally, as though there are no notes that they’re trying to reach. Sometimes they’re hitting notes that fit the key of the surrounding music. Sometimes they aren’t. What, you care?

Hype Machine: Muscles

posted by nerdbound

Well, fuck majesty. From here on in it’s going to be hack work all the way — you know, the kind you see on the typical music blog run by college students who like to fawn all over their favourite new artists with worn colloquialisms and stale verbal jisms of delight. (Incidentally, does ‘jism’ refer only to the substance or also to the act of discharge? I’m using it in the latter sense, but I’m not entirely sure if that’s valid.) Here’s the difference though, the one that will keep you coming back — here at elastic resonance, we take the hack to new levels of hackiness. It’s like irony, except instead of being sly and clever and ever so subtle, we’re just bad. Think of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s entire oeuvre — yeah, that bad. And yet we’ll conduct the entire enterprise smartly, with a sharpness and cheekiness that will become a recognizable brand of brilliance. That’s what we’re all about here (and really, anywhere that writes about music) — revelling in shittiness to the point of glory. How else could we live with ourselves?

And speaking of hack work cum brilliance (hackneyed transition drumroll please!), it’s time I displayed some of my love for mash-ups. Here’s the thing about mash-ups — they usually have no point. Seriously. There are times when the demands of musical fusion entail mixing two songs together, but mash-ups are not the children of those times. Mash-ups are the children of times when DJs sit around thinking to themselves, “Let’s see what I can do with my infinite skills! Oh my Gawd, look how clever I am! No one could have imagined mixing Journey with Ciara! The ironic juxtaposition is just too much for the ordinary mind to handle! When people hear it, their minds will be overloaded by the lack of sense the song makes, and they too will begin thinking in exclamations! Rawk!”

You think I’m just playing this up for yuks here, but mash-ups are seriously the musical expression of some sort of postmodern angst. Turntablism is about DJs using samples to create new aural textures, mixing in snippets and fragments from the most unlikely sources to generate a vast landscape of sound, with every sample and beat and learning video speech clip a natural, organic inhabitant. Mash-ups are about jamming songs into each other, hammering the square peg into the round hole, and calling that a work of art just because it doesn’t make sense but you did it anyway. The enjoyment you derive from a mash-up is ultimately a referential pleasure, not a pure one — when “Don’t Stop Believin’” is mixed with “Sexy Back”, you listen because damned if it isn’t an unexpected idea given our cultural context. How good it sounds is inconsequential to how good it is. And that’s because mash-ups, at least as the genre is primarily practiced today, are not music. They are cultural excrement. They are the third season of Arrested Development, all in-jokes and no real ones. They are surviving purely on the audience’s knowledge of the real music that has gone before, and their value is judged on where they fall on the cultural scales of relevance and unexpectedness, rather than any actual musical qualities. Just look at the components of a typical mash-up — the vocals from a rap track and the beats from some terribly white indie band. Rarely does anyone think about mashing up two indie songs or two rap songs, despite the interesting lyrical, melodic, and rhythmic possibilities there, and that’s because there’s no cultural shock value from mixing two white songs or two black songs — it’s the “oh WOW, won’t you look at that, Agnes!” reaction that most mash-up artists are shooting for.

And that’s not a bad thing, just as the third season of Arrested Development wasn’t really all that disappointing once you got used to the idea. Self-referentialism can be brilliant, and savouring the deliciousness of an idea can be just as good as drowning in an awesome song. But you have to recognize it for what it is, and what it is is hack work that occasionally results in flashes of brilliance. It’s in that spirit of hackneyed genius that I bring you the following tracks. (Also, I was getting tired of writing, and defending mash-ups on a general level seemed much less interesting than either attacking them or writing about specific tracks.)

ABX is a denizen of The Hood Internet, a regularly updated mash-up paradise, and “Collide You A Drank” transforms the annoying vocals of T-Pain’s “Buy You A Drank (Shawty Snappin’” and the emotional, strangled guitar of Cloud Cult’s “Chemicals Collide” into a pulsing, urgent beat that sweeps and soars all around, weaving all the melodic elements together.

A plus D is the DJ team of Adrian and the Mysterious D, and they are just plain genius. I’ve got three tracks here, but they’ve got a ton more on their website, and each track is great in its own way. “Indie Hyphy” is an incredibly infectious mix of the most danceable elements from both E-40 and Keak Da Sneak’s “Tell Me When To Go” and Cold War Kids’ “Hang Me Up To Dry.” Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” provides a rollicking disco beat to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.” And “Love Will Tear You Apart (She Wants Originality)”, the post-punk pièce de résistance mix of Joy Division, Bauhaus, and She Wants Revenge, relies on no dance-club gimmicks to create a wonderfully layered atmosphere. A plus D is one of the only truly versatile mash-up artists I’ve seen, drawing from beyond the latest mainstream hip hop tracks to produce some of the most creative ideas I’ve ever heard. Be sure to visit their site and check out their other stuff.

And finally, one of my favourite songs of all time: Arty Fufkin‘s mix of “Hollaback Girl” by Gwen Stefani and Pharrell and “Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz and De La Soul. “Hollaback Girl” is one of the most truly awful songs of our time, but surrounded by the bass and beats of Gorillaz, the chanty vocals and distorted croons take on a life of their own, eventually even adding back to the Gorillaz’ song. In fact, I can’t listen to either of the original songs now without feeling as if they are somehow empty. This mash-up is also unique in that it manages to trade off between the beats and vocals of each song, rather than merely laying down the vocals of one track onto the instrumentals of another; somehow, miraculously, De La Soul’s raps are supported by a refrain of “It’s my shit, it’s my shit” and it sounds good. The rest of Arty Fufkin’s tracks are sadly fairly hit-or-miss and mostly mediocre, but this one track remains my favourite mash-up of all time, embodying all that is wonderful about this genre.

Enjoy your bastard pop, kids.

MP3: ABX – Collide You A Drank (T-Pain vs. Cloud Cult)
MP3: A plus D – Beethoven’s Fifth Gold Digger (Kanye West vs. Beethoven vs. Walter Murphy)
MP3: A plus D – Indie Hyphy (E-40 vs. Cold War Kids)
MP3: A plus D – Love Will Tear You Apart / She Wants Originality (She Wants Revenge vs. Joy Division vs. Bauhaus)
MP3: Arty Fufkin – Hollaback Girls Feel Good (Gwen Stefani vs. Gorillaz)

P.S.
I have no idea why all these artists’ names begin with A.

posted by ninjajabberwocky

First, both ninjajabberwocky and I have been really busy of late, and both simultaneously dropped the ball on getting posts up on this blog. This is a bad thing, so I’m putting something up.

Second, we’ve noticed that one of the reasons why our blogging has dropped off is that our posts have tended to be too formal. Thus, they take too long to make, and we don’t actually spend time doing it because it’s too… well, ‘intimidating’ is not quite the right word, but some word like that. Thus, this post is going to take me like 20 minutes to make. Hehe. But it’s still going to be good, I swear.

There have been a bunch of good albums which have come out in the past couple of months. A couple of them are pretty generally known: Kanye West’s Graduation, Radiohead’s In Rainbows, etc. I wanted to put up a few more albums that I’ve been listening to which not enough people are talking about:

First and foremost: Les Savy Fav’s Let’s Stay Friends. It’s some fucking great post-punk styled indie rock. Les Savy Fav have often been compared with Fugazi, who are one of my favorite bands ever, and it’s usually a good comparison. But here they don’t sound like it: They’ve gone really pop, compared to their other stuff. And it’s great news, which is rare. “Patty Lee” is a truly great pop song which is kinda a perfect example of how the album sounds: The angular guitars are still there, but they’re hidden under melodies and good singing. There are still some more aggressive tracks though, which are still awesome. And the rhythm section is fucking awesome, of course. That’s basically why the album matters: The rhythms are so tight that the songs will be driven into your head.

Sunset Rubdown’s Random Spirit Lover is amazing, and it’s hard to explain why. The songs are a mess. They don’t sound like anything else I’ve heard, which is a plus. But if I heard any of these songs alone, I would find them annoying and scattered. However, the album generates its own particular mood, within which the songs makes sense. The first third is just good pop music, but in the middle third of the album, starting with “Colt Stands Up, Grows Horns”, the songs become really experimental. And I keep thinking: I wish I knew why this is good music.

There are a couple of other great albums I want to at least mention, although they’re both very not-mainstream-listenable. A Place to Bury Strangers are this new band whose self-titled debut is brilliant. It’s basically shoegaze/Jesus and Mary Chain-style music, but along with beautiful lush pop feedback, it has a bunch of industrial noisy angry feedback. “To Fix the Gash in your Head” is one of my favorite tracks of the year. It’s almost danceable, but is about kicking someone’s head in. Between the Buried and Me are the other band I feel that I must mention, because their Colors is the best metal album of the year. For a lot of people, that’s like saying ‘the best knife to the stomach’ but if you give it a chance, there’s so much innovation behind the screaming. Seriously.

The other album I want to mention is not a new release, but some 90′s stuff I’d never heard before. It’s the Boo Radley’s Giant Steps. Highest recommendation possible for this album, I swear. The stylistic variety is so great, it’s mind-boggling, but the songs all fit together too. It ranges from Beach Boys to 90′s alt rock to jazz to psychedelia to Britpop to guitar noise. And it’s all uniformly excellent. Best thing I’ve heard in a long time.

I’m not really feeling like uploading a lot of tracks, but here’s Hype Machine/YouTube:

Hype Machine: A Place to Bury Strangers – To Fix The Gash in your Head
YouTube: The Boo Radleys – Lazarus

posted by nerdbound

I’d never heard Electrelane before this album, but hearing it inspired me to go listen to their older material. At least on a first listen, nothing else is the achievement that this record is, although that’s not really fair, because never before have they seemed to be trying to make this record. Axes really is a droning rock record, strongly influenced by Kraut-rock. While The Power Out is more pop-influenced, it doesn’t have the natural, free sound and strong sense of identity that this record has (although “Enter Laughing” and some other tracks come close). Instead, it sounds like Stereolab (French pop drones) made a bit more punk. That’s a cool sound too of course, but No Shouts, No Calls is a brave step away from their influences. The sound isn’t entirely accessible, but more because it’s so personal and thoughtful than because its genre is drone or punk, and not pop.

“The Greater Times” did not impress me on a first listen, but it’s a grower, like many of the songs here. It builds very slowly, and beautiful melodic moments often occur only once or twice, as the melody continually meanders. The quantity of ideas here is impressive, and I think that might be why the song has grown on me so much. The lyrics also make this song a success: references to childhood and romance create a friendly atmosphere of innocence. The song really becomes superb around the two-minute mark: “You say you don’t know / What love means / Any more” is a beautiful “Modern Romance”-esque statement which grounds much of the rest of what is said on this album. It’s a call back to romantic comedies. You know, the ones where a cute guy and a cute girl who aren’t very personally compatible (they’re complete opposites, and hate each other at first) are drawn together by this inexplicable ‘love’ stuff. I’m not exactly a romantic, but the sentiment here is powerful, perhaps because, like “Modern Romance”, it doesn’t so much describe how this ‘love’ stuff is supposed to work as criticize its absence. The modern world is a big thing to criticize, but the album creates a little space where dreams of love seem grounded in reality. Which is kinda nice.

“To the East” is the single, and it is brilliant. The melodies are so well-arranged that every few seconds there’s another fantastic moment. When they sing “The East’s not so far away. / It could be home!” at 2:25, or “Come back / Come back / COME BACK / oh, to me!” a minute and some later, the emotion and beauty are both very real. “After the Call” follows, and is the first track that speeds up the pace and increases the sound of the guitar in the mix. It rocks, even beneath the fragile cries of “What can I do?” The contrast between the insistent rock guitars and the beautiful bedroom vocals makes for an incredible sound. The sense that the band really cares about the music shows through in the music’s insistent propulsion and emotional depth.

“Tram 21″ is one of those tracks that’s almost an instrumental: vocals are present, but not lyrics, and instead the voices are used as texture and harmony. A great riff, then a guitar melody (I think that’s the ‘real’ melody, to be honest, and the vocals are just faking it), suddenly gaining in force. Then a chorus of ooh’s and ah’s forming a second melodic line. Then a second set of ooh’s and ah’s for more harmonic force. It’s a completely brilliant mood piece, full of ups and downs. The following track, “In Berlin” is perhaps the best track: it builds on a delicate arpeggio, adding strings, and slowly crescendoing to a brilliant climax: “You are all I long for this winter / and you are all I need”. The blend of sounds is intricate and seamless. “At Sea” is the joyous follow-up: “They say / There’s always tomorrow”, they sing, and then the guitar just starts bouncing.

“Between the Wolf and the Dog” begins as the hardest rocker on the album with an awesome riff, but when the vocals come in, they contrast strongly, somewhat softening the piece, and completely altering its feel. “Saturday” follows, creating a mood of innocence and wonder with a very simple yet gorgeous piano melody. However, it’s “Cut and Run” which really takes that mood and runs with it, achieving near-perfection. Acoustic (w/ ukelele!), it sounds like nothing else on the album, but is small, thoughtful, and ridiculously sweet. It’s a beautiful piece of bedroom sing-along indie pop, and the fact that it is this good is a testament to Electrelane’s song-writing.

Often, music about romance fails because it’s too delicate and wimpy, or because it’s over-emotional to the point where it glorifies destructive emotions (like the feeling of despair following a breakup). Either way, it can come off as brainless or whiny. This is highly successful music about romance, because it’s based on calls for strength and intelligence, with strong and intelligent music to back it up. It argues for romance, not because romance is a cure-all, but because romance is something worth working hard to achieve. And that’s a sentiment that even a real cynic can’t help but admire and treasure.

9.0/10

MP3: Electrelane – In Berlin
MP3: Electrelane – Cut And Run

posted by nerdbound

ninjajabberwocky and I used to disagree on the issue of whether or not Animal Collective was really all that good. The disagreement is now officially at an end: I have finally come around to seeing that they’re pretty damn good. The reason is their new album, Strawberry Jam, which is a revelation, sounding totally new and fresh. On a first listen, it’s pretty fucking phenomenal. I re-listened to their older stuff, and it still doesn’t really fully click with me, but this album is a pretty clear classic, I have to say. It’s a bigger, louder record than any they’ve done before. Yeah, that means that it can be a bit annoying in places… But by and large it miraculously isn’t. It’s a record that needs to be listened to.

Just thought I’d post that brief note. A review will probably follow from one of us later. We’re both really swamped right now, so less is getting written here than we would like, but it’ll pick up again in a couple days, I feel. Meantime, do yourself a favor and give this album a spin.

MP3: Animal Collective – Peacebone
MP3: Animal Collective – For Reverend Green

posted by nerdbound

Visuals, baby. That’s what it was all about at this show. I’d bought tickets for my girlfriend Nicole and me with confidence that we’d hear a great show, and of course the music was great – a perfectly harmonized flood of sound flooring the audience at every turn – but what made this show amazing was how good it looked.

It starts when Grizzly Bear trudges up, slouching with a jaded weariness, staring gauntly out into the audience. After briefly announcing that they have just arrived from Portland, they silently turn to their instruments. The drums strike up and the guitar strings begin plucking their way into “Easier”, the first track from their 2006 album Yellow House. The song chugs steadily away for a while, the musicians silent and tight-lipped. Then, as the aural atmosphere coalesces, one by one each man slowly raises his head to gaze up into the lights, eyebrows lifting precariously, jaws finally wrenching open to deliver a magnificent mixture of moans and croons and wails, light and airy yet exquisitely piercing. The overall effect is to free the notes from their crude human sources – chords seemingly drift up out of nowhere, and ethereal voices layer on one by one, with bass/clarinet/flute player Chris Taylor’s almost imperceptible falsetto ringing in the echoing background of every beautifully blending chord.

photo courtesy of Muhammad Asranur

As the set progresses, Grizzly Bear’s weariness seems to melt away as they become the heavenly vessels of a rare sonic purity. Taylor especially is an amazing spectacle to watch, his eyes shut beneath his pale hair, mouth stretched wide open in a Charlie Brown-sized wail as he clenches his hands tight over the edges of his bass guitar, which bucks and twitches with every crest and valley in his fluctuating falsetto. Drummer Christopher Bear too provides phenomenal stage energy; his body taut and twisted at an odd angle from all the tension within, he releases energy in incredible bursts of speed, sticks flying through the air to bottom out the songs with quick, pounding beats. Whereas on the album, percussion was relegated to the backseat for the swirling harmonies, here the beats are at the helm, driving and controlling the mood of each song. The songs overflow beyond their album instantiations throughout the set, especially an expansive, messily loud take on “Little Brother.” Thirty minutes of heavenly harmonies and textures, and then the band vanishes from the stage after some thank you’s, leaving the air ringing with the silent echoes of their performance.

After a short break, Feist’s backup band emerges under a dim blue light, scuttling across the stage to their places. The light beats of the xylophone begin, playing in the familiar pattern of “Honey Honey”. Feist enters and bends down to one mic, singing: “Ah-ah-ahh, ha-ah, ah-ah.” Her voice comes echoing back at her through the speakers, strained and fuzzy, reflecting off the walls as she stands still, listening carefully. And then she bends down again, a sweet harmony dropping from her lips into the mic, where it locks tight against the repeating melody. Feist lowers her head four more times, each time adding yet another harmony until the hall is filled with notes reverberating against every surface, clinging to one another in a beautifully fragile chord. And then, taking up the other microphone, she finally breathes the lyric into the aural fold: “Honey, honey, up in the trees, fill the flowers deep in his dreams…”

You know the way Feist’s voice is sultry and seductive, yet breathily girlish, seemingly encompassing all the romantic fancies of a seven-year-old girl in a summer dress running through the field as daisy petals swirl around her? Witnessing that voice in action is all that and more. The way she tilts her head from side to side, hair shaking out in a delicate wave behind her; the way she playfully punches pow-pow-pow along with the drumbeats; the way she peeks out demurely from behind her bangs with a spark of mischief in her eyes; the way she sways all across the stage, slow and mesmerizing during the quiet pieces but in wild joyful arcs for the upbeat numbers, stabbing at her guitar as she stamps her feet and flicks her hips back and forth. Innocent, girlish exuberance radiates from her in all directions, flowing through the crowd and infecting everyone with a silly childish energy.

The set is a stunner, checking off almost every song from The Reminder, from the soft acoustic rhythm of “So Sorry” to the carefree histrionics of “I Feel It All”. The lights strung across the stage explode the dimness away, sweeping swathes of reds and blues, with the Fillmore’s giant disco ball shattering them all into a million pieces and flinging shards of light across the faces of the ecstatic audience. All throughout, Feist slathers on her thick, throaty voice with the help of loops and vocal effects until the air drips with croons and simpers and even whistles and bird calls (creating a peaceful atmosphere for “The Park”).

photo courtesy of Daniel Khamsing

At one point, Feist calls for a classically trained pianist from the audience, and the crowd yields Melissa Wong, an 18-year-old from San Mateo who coaxes a beautiful rendition of Debussy’s “Reverie” from the upright piano on stage. Wong creates just as compelling a vision as Feist, quietly swaying her body into and out of the piano’s reach as her hands move gracefully along the keys. The rest of the audience gets to participate too when Feist invites them to harmonize on a chord, with each person’s interval determined by the material in the soles of their shoes (rubber, leather, and wood). The chord hangs suspended in the air for good ten seconds, and then suddenly melts into the sweetly wistful lyrics, “I’m sorry…two words I always think after you’re gone…”

After playing “1234”, Feist and the band exit the stage swiftly. Soon enough, though, the band returns to their stations. At first it appears that they are fooling around on their instruments to entertain the crowd, but soon a rhythm of hand claps begins, and the phrase “Sea lion!” can be heard faintly from the back of the stage. Feist reenters to screaming cheers, and the band proceeds to tear into an incredibly raucous rendition of “Sealion”, complete with a scalding guitar solo and band members dancing everywhere. The audience cries its appreciation, but before they can finish, suddenly Kevin Drew is there on stage, moaning the words to “Major Label Debut” with his lips pressed up to Feist’s with only a mic to separate them: “Forced to live like it’s a curfew – translation: means ‘I love you’.” Drew and Feist together are a serious hazard to the stage, swinging in all directions with a dangerous madness – Drew wields his microphone stand recklessly, stooping it down to ridiculously acute angles, and Feist jumps about waving the neck of her guitar back and forth as if it’s a sabre.

When it’s all over, Feist steps up and professes her pseudo-love to the crowd (“I saw Janet Jackson when I was 13, and when she told the audience ‘I love you!’, even then I was cynical enough to think, ‘That’s such a lie!’”) before closing with a quiet, gentle “Let It Die”. She stands there simply, plainly singing with little ornamentation, just as I stand there with Nicole, just as all the rest of the audience stands there – together quiet, together mirroring what we together witness – and the sight is beautiful to see.

Video: My Moon My Man (2:55)
Video: Open Window (Sarah Harman cover) (3:50)
Video: Sealion (0:49)
Video: 1234 (2:53) (June 27 show)
Video: Lover’s Spit with Kevin Drew (4:06) (June 27 show)
(all videos courtesy of Stephanie Hefner)

Photos: Feist @ Fillmore (courtesy of Daniel Khamsing)
Photos: Feist (courtesy of Muhammad Asranur)

Link: Melissa Wong’s Livejournal entry about her experience (courtesy of Ms. Wong herself)
Link: Feist setlist (courtesy of Muhammad Asranur)
Link: Grizzly Bear setlist (courtesy of Daniel Khamsing)

posted by ninjajabberwocky