Inessentials

I made my first venture to The Space in Hamden, CT, a small venue that was specifically designed to be an all-ages venue in an state with very few places for the kiddos to hang out. Somehow I had always had a conflict on the nights when previous bands I wanted to see had come through, but I made sure I wasn’t going to miss Thao. While I was well above the median age of the audience, there was a group of six folks older than me that showed up just for Thao’s set. They were absolutely astonished that someone of Thao’s reputation was playing a club that looks like your friend’s basement. (If your friend had really, really great connections.)

Opening for Thao were All the Friends and Magic Man. All the Friends are an experimental indie rock trio from Waterbury, CT. I think these three young guys are still finding their sound. Each song sounded like an ode to a (worthy) influence. There’s the Beirut song, the Radiohead song, the Dirty Projectors song. But what really stands out about them is their very refined musicianship. They have not only the band nerd vibe, they’ve got some serious music chops, and as they continue to grow and explore who they want to become as a band, that underlying talent will give them a chance to make some truly great music. Download All the Friends’ two-song demo.

Magic Man at The Space (from the Magic Man Myspace page)

Magic Man played a boisterous set in the middle position. I always enjoy an indie band that isn’t afraid of dance music, and Magic Man embrace the joy of bodily movement like few bands I’ve seen. The most obvious comparison is to The Killers, but there are elements of Vampire Weekend in the vocals and the drastic tempo swings recall pioneering emo bands like Modest Mouse. Technically a duo, Magic Man played with a four-piece band, but the real hero was the little white Macbook producing a surprisingly smart and full sound, never just bleeps for bleeps sake or drum loops because there isn’t a drummer, but really filling out the sound. I am looking forward to listening to their debut album, which is available for free.

Thao is in the middle of a Northeast mini-tour following a month-long tour of Europe this winter. There is a rush that comes from standing about seven feet from the band with the 2008 best-selling album by a Kill Rock Stars band (Decemberists, Elliot Smith, Deerhoof). And when she said the good folks at Manic Productions had sent them to Miya’s Sushi, well, my worlds collided just a wee bit. (Wouldn’t Thao and Bun Lai have the cutest, most creative little babies ever?)

Thao’s set ran through all the highlights of We Brave Bee Stings and All and Know Better Learn Faster (except “Easy,” which may have been intended for an encore, but the venue was set up in such a way that the band leaving the stage before the encore left the audience confused and prevented us from showing the love to bring them back out). Thao’s music focuses on melodies and rhythms, the melodies nesting in as catchy little earworms and the the rhythms providing foot-tapping, hand-clapping happiness that warms your whole body over. I was happy to see that the Thao and the fellas had provided some different arrangements for the live versions of the songs. I now much prefer the live version of “Violet” to the album version. The songs (unsurprisingly) were immensely fun to sing along with, and the band provided some high-end claps that clearly challenged the audience. (I saw more than a few people shrug and give up. Clapping is hard for white high school kids from the ‘burbs.)

All in all, a pretty great show.

Some not-too-specific spoilers for Chuck and Burn Notice‘s third seasons

There’s an old adage in music that sophomore albums are usually terrible. Many bands manage one great break-through album before their sophomore release reveals a band not worth the investment. If the sophomore album holds steady or improves on the debut, then you have a band that is really worth throwing yourself into for the long haul.

I think something important also happens on television shows in their second year, but it’s often the opposite from the music case. Many shows have trouble finding just that right balance of tone in their first year. Occasionally they recover, but too late to save the show, like Dollhouse. Sometimes they recover and they have the good fortune to be on NBC (!), where very modest ratings can bring back buzz-building shows like Parks and Recreation, which is having a wonderful second season. But a good show is one that can manage by its second season to strike consistently in its tonal sweet spot, and hit that groove through enough episodes to make for really enjoyable viewing.

A great example of this is Chuck, which somewhere around episode five or six of its second year turned from modest and enjoyable spy comedy to unbelievably hilarious spy show, workplace comedy, and heart-twisting drama. In that second season, it was about as perfect as a lightweight TV show can be.

Burn Notice was always designed to be more episodic, and there are plenty of great moments in the first season. But the immensely irritating brother was largely removed in the second season, and the mother was made less histrionic and more sympathetic in the second season, which eliminated the two most unwatchable elements of the first season. The story became more complex without being too dense, the actors revealed themselves to be very comfortable in their roles, and the writing for each character became more specific. It was a pretty great season.

Then in the third seasons of both Chuck and Burn Notice, the producers made a change, and that change was largely the same in both cases. To push the edges of what each show did well, they attempted to take the central character (Chuck Bartowski and Michael Weston) and isolate them from their closest allies (Sarah & Casey for Chuck, Sam & Fiona for Michael Weston). In doing so, they took each character to a slightly darker place that challenged the viewer’s understanding and relationship to each lead. (This is more true for Chuck than Michael Weston, but it applies to both.) Can Chuck became a “real spy” and still be the person that Sarah (and the viewer) loves? Can Michael work for Gilroy and still be the good guy that does bad things for helpless people, which keeps Sam and Fiona (and the viewer) as allies?

It makes for more challenging viewing to see the central character in the show you love become less sympathetic. But when it works, it works. Buffy the Vampire Slayer worked well through seven seasons by pushing its title character further and further away from her friends (and only occasionally closer again) and making her more and more irritating. But the writers (often, not always) did such a fine job of telling their story that the viewer was rewarded with seven good-to-great seasons, even when those seasons (starting with two) push the lead character to a dark place that distances her from her friends.

But it doesn’t always work, which is what is worrying a lot of fans of Chuck. Where is the normal guy we loved? Where is the relationship with Sarah going? Who are these new characters pushing our two lovers away? Why is Chuck acting like such an ass? Has the show, in the unfortunate parlance of our time, jumped the shark?

Although I have some small worries, I do not think Chuck has ruined itself. It’s going through a fairly typical attempt (especially typical for a third season) to create drama by isolating the main character. And – this is important – the worries that we have about Chuck are amplified by standard television scheduling. Waiting week to week for each episode allows one to dwell on those worries about where the story is going and reduces the trust we have in showrunners to tell a compelling story. I’m sure many of the complaints about this season of Chuck would be dissipated if it could be watched in one weekend mega-viewing, without the unfortunate weeklong wait or monthlong Olympics hiatus. Let’s trust Josh Schwartz & Chris Fedak. We’ve already seen in the last month that Matt Nix can push Michael Weston to a similar place as Chuck and bring him back. Similarly, the third season of Mad Men left many cold in its front half, until viewers had a chance to see where Matt Weiner was taking us. (Surprise! He further isolated Don Draper from his family.) I don’t doubt (too much) that Schwartz & Fedak can do the same.

And even if they don’t, so what? Let them tell the story they need to tell, even if that means it loses some of its audience. I’m waiting to watch this last season of Lost for a while still, but I really hope they leave a lot of loose ends, things that leave the audience wondering. Great stories can do that. They can leave us disappointed, and they should, because sometimes life leaves us disappointed. (Of course, a show can be disappointing because it gets less good, but I’m talking about a story taking a character or story to a place we don’t want them to go.)

So I haven’t given up on Chuck, and those who have seen the screeners are saying tonight’s episode is pretty dang awesome. Cheers to third season isolation, and the hug-it-out moment we invariably get at the end.

I have very little to say about music in the year 2009. I wasn’t even planning to do a recap or best-of, but then I realized that last.fm shows play counts by album. So here are my most-listened to albums that were released in 2009. And you can always see what’s in my ears at my last.fm page. (I should note that when songs are played back-to-back, it only counts as one play, which hurt albums that I usually listened to sequentially like Bitte Orca. It also is obviously biased toward albums released earlier in the year, like Noble Beast.)

• 154 plays: U2, No Line on the Horizon
• 140 plays: Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
• 118 plays: Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
• 117 plays: Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
• 117 plays: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz!
• 106 plays: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, s/t
• 99 plays: Metric, Fantasies
• 92 plays: Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career
• 88 plays: Sin Fang Bous, Clangour
• 85 plays: Mos Def, The Ecstatic
• 83 plays: Monsters of Folk, s/t
• 79 plays: Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
• 75 plays: Blind Pilot, 3 Rounds and a Sound
• 69 plays: Passion Pit, Manners
• 69 plays: Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
• 61 plays: Ida Maria, Fortress ‘Round My Heart
• 59 plays: Bishop Allen, Grrr…
• 59 plays: The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You
• 50 plays: God Help the Girl, s/t

My Best of the Decade albums list is yet to come, but I so enjoyed writing about my path into Television in the 2000s, that I thought I would sketch out the highlights of my experience of music over the past decade. This isn’t a list, it’s a story.

On October 2, 2000, alt-rock heroes Radiohead released Kid A, which stands as turning point in the history of popular music. At the time, people focused on the album’s use of “electronica” – a wishy-washy term for a mish-mash of genres that had developed parallel to and largely without interaction with rock and alternative music in the 1990s. Was this the end of rock and roll? The beginning of electronica’s mainstream appeal? The album debuted at number one in the US and went platinum in its first week in the UK. What listeners today focus on is the album’s complex arrangements, and now a proper analysis of the album should really explain its debts to twentieth century avante-garde, classical, and jazz traditions in addition to the various styles of electronic and rock music that were also influences. But for me, this album wasn’t about any of that (well, a little about electronic music). For me, it was the first time I was so overwhelmed listening to an album, that I stopped everything I was doing, turned out the lights, and just listened to the album all the way through. It blew me away. I wasn’t sure that I liked it, but I knew that it was important. I knew that I was hearing something new, something that mattered, something that I should have an opinion about. As the sound flooded my college dorm room through my parents’ thirty-year-old Kenwood stereo system (still the best sounding system I’ve ever owned/borrowed), I was awash in wave after wave of gorgeous sound. Lyrical mimimism and sonic richness would be Radiohead’s calling card in the 2000s, and it began here. Since that first listen, I’ve never forgotten the horn part that first enters 2:40 into “The National Anthem,” which still sounds to me like one of the most crucial tracks in the history of popular music.

In college, I did a little bit of music reviewing and a couple interviews for an online-only publication run by my roommate out of our dorm room, which he had inherited through an internship he had while the publication was print-only. And my first taste of being a real critic came when I got an advance copy of U2′s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Sure, I got the album the night before it’s October 31, 2000 release date, but still, I got it early. That’s a big deal for a person was then (and still now) a huge U2 fanboy.

That experience was one sort of thrill, but seeing U2 at Madison Square Garden just weeks after September 11 was a different sort of thrill. They were unveiling the giant white banners with the names of the 9/11 victims scrolling down it, which would reach a national audience during their performance at that January’s Superbowl halftime. They honored NYFD by having them join the band on stage during the closing number, “Out of Control,” which they were also celebrating on the 20th anniversary of that single’s release. I’ve previously called attending a U2 concert a spiritual experience, but this reached a level of transcendence I never expect to have repeated in my lifetime. If there’s a heaven, it will be something like that night. Earlier that evening I had met two friends from college who were working with homeless people near the World Trade Center in the months leading up to the attacks, and because they were known to the people there, they were some of the few people allowed to hand out food, water, and coffee to the rescue workers in the days after the collapse of the towers. After sharing a slice of pizza with them, I went to Madison Square Garden for a different kind of tribute with a different kind of beauty.

During that time in graduate school was the peak of my interest in downloading music illegally. Maybe some day I’ll get around to a post on the ethics of downloading illegally (after all, I do teach ethics to college kids). But let me make this one point now, which was then the most important feature for me: Being isolated from people very knowledgeable about the sort of music I was interested in, my only way of finding bands was to test out songs by downloading them through file-sharing websites. (My personal favorite was Audiogalaxy.) Then, if I liked the songs I heard from a band – and this is key – I would legally purchase the entire album. Downloading an entire song was the only way to test a band’s sound before the 30-second samples on iTunes and Amazon MP3. I threw myself into the (legally purchased) collected works of The Velvet Underground, Matthew Sweet, and Stereolab because of what I discovered through Audiogalaxy.

I took some time off from graduate school in the middle of the decade, and during part of that time I worked at a Borders store, where my musical knowledge grew through chatting with my coworkers and playing the most interesting music that wouldn’t offend families looking for You: The Owner’s Manual or The Da Vinci Code. (While working there, I also met Dennis Quaid a week after his wedding. He was buying his son Spiderman 2.)

I then moved to the Twin Cities for a teaching job, where I threw myself into 89.3 The Current, the best radio station I know about, which was then at its peak of DJ-selected variety. (It’s since restricted its playlist and given DJs less power, but I still recommend it for people looking for non-commercial radio.) Twice on The Current I had heard songs by some guy named Sufjan Stevens, and on the basis of those two songs alone I dragged my wife to a late night concert at First Ave. Come on Feel the Illinoise! had just been released, and it had yet to appear at the top of everyone’s Best of 2005 lists. What we experienced that night was pretty remarkable. The band, dressed as University of Illinois cheerleaders performed melodically fascinating songs set to bizarre instrumentation (the banjo player is now playing the trombone!) interspersed with cheerleading routines. It’s hands-down one of the best concert experiences of my life. We would also see Death Cab for Cutie in that same club at about the same time; Plans had just been released and six months later they would return to the Twin Cities at the Target Center arena.

Returning to graduate school in 2007, I sat down one night in the fall and downloaded all the legal and free MP3s I could find at sites like download.com. Shortly thereafter, I subscribed to eMusic, and expanded on those initial findings to begin my complete immersion into the world of indie rock. Breaking away from the recommendations of my more knowledgeable music friends, I began to explore for myself. In that time I discovered The Fiery Furnaces, Kimya Dawson, Mates of State, and I’ve never been quite the same since. I’ve developed new musical passions since then, but I haven’t yet stopped my indie rock obsession. For instance, so far this year I have bought 39 albums released in 2009. (That number would go up considerably if I added albums from other years.) Nearly all of them are artists releasing on independent labels and most have come to me through eMusic, which until this summer was a subscription service devoted solely to independent labels. This would lead us to great shows at Toad’s Place in New Haven and a few in NYC. The best of these, and in many ways the best all-around concert experience I’ve had, was seeing The National perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Promoting Boxer during BAM’s year of celebrating the variety and quality of Brooklyn music, the concert was flawless in execution, energetic in performance, perfect in acoustics and line-of-sight, and featured a walk on by Sufjan Stevens to play piano on “Ada,” which he helped arrange on the album.

Ccritical consensus seems to be that this is one of the best decades for popular music since the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s. What I know is that it has been a great decade to explore the fringes of popular music.

The Avett Brothers (brothers Scott and Seth and friend Bob Crawford) take the banjo, guitar, cello, and occasionally piano and drums that belong firmly in the bluegrass tradition of their native North Carolina and take it somewhere completely unexpected. Rather than following the contemporary bluegrass tendencies to play traditional tunes and exhibit superior musicianship through banjo picking and bass plucking, the Avetts play with a punk attitude: screw the classics, screw showiness, and play raw, emotional music. The punk movement was founded on the idea that conveying emotion was far more important than knowing how to play your instruments, and that’s the makes the Avett Brothers so very punk: although very capable and talented mult-instrumentalists, they subsume all aspects of musicianship to the twin forces of singing forcefully and crafting lyrics. Their instruments are played roughly, creating a natural percussion so forceful you hardly notice the lack of drums on most of their songs.

That attitude also makes for a great performance. The audience is drawn in by the clear desire to emote and connect. For a band that isn’t in the mainstream (yet), there are a remarkable number of people singing along at an Avett Brothers concert. On Saturday night in New York City’s Terminal 5, the boys were able to step back and let the audience take over singing on the very first song of the night! I’m not sure I’d seen that immediate a connection before. It sure didn’t hurt that the song was off The Avett Brothers’ best and best loved LP, Emotionalism.

That style of performance has its downside, too. If you are not one of the throngs singing along, but stuck on the edges watching, their is little musicianship happening to engage your attention. (Seeing them at Terminal 5 didn’t help matters with its unusual viewing angles.) And thus arises one of the great concert-going questions: Is it better to be stuck amongst the rabble, claustrophobia setting in, as everyone jostles for positions and drowns out the band, or is it better to be on the edges amongst the beer-swilling loud-talkers? My wife and I had a little of both at Terminal 5. I prefer trading elbow jabs for a chance to experience that communal concert experience, whereas my wife prefers the comfort of breathable air even if that means dealing with people who paid $30 each to stand and talk to their buddies all night.

But the key, of course, is to go. And sing.

October looks to be a great month for music, probably the best since January of this year. Here’s a preview of what I’m looking forward to listening to this month.

Tuesday, October 6: The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come

John Darnielle, the biggest name in the very small genre of indie lo-fi, structures his annual album around 12 Bible verses, which inform the songs less than they serve as markers for his typically pentetrating lyrics. When he wants, he can let raw emotion scream through better than any death metal band; this makes the album’s highlight Psalm 40:2, where he really cuts loose. Considered by many to be the best lyricist alive, this album is worth a listen (but be warned that his nasally voice will turn some listeners off). Not up to the high standards of The Sunset Tree, but a solid album.

Tuesday, October 13: The Flaming Lips, Embryonic

After delving into prog rock with At War with the Mystics (which doubled as a break-up album written about what an awful person Beck is), this album is reportedly a return to the lushness of The Soft Bulletin, which kicked off their late-career revival. Fingers crossed on this one.

Tuesday, October 13: Thao, Know Better Learn Faster

Vietnamese-American pop songstress Thao returns with her third album. Expect a lot of wonderful hits and some annoying misses. Probably best to download specific tracks from this one, but I’ll give the whole thing a listen and decide.

Friday, October 16: The Twilight Saga: New Moon Soundtrack

No one with a Y chromosome is looking forward to this film, but this soundtrack is pretty intriguing. We’re getting previously unreleased tracks from Thom Yorke, Death Cab for Cutie, The Killers, Sea Wolf, and Bon Iver & St. Vincent, among others. So, yea?

Tuesday, October 20: Sufjan Stevens, The BQE

Non-New Yorkers, rejoice! Sufjan’s massive multimedia project which was commissioned by and ran for a weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is now being released as a double CD/DVD collection. (Be warned that buying this album from iTunes or eMusic means you’ll miss out on the DVD.) Sufjan has complained in recent interviews that no one buys albums any more, so he doesn’t see the point in making them. Let’s prove him wrong, and also see the visual interpretations (hula hoops!) he chooses to accompany his ode to the New York thruway.

September is the launch of the yearly television cycle, the start of the Oscar-baiting films, and the chance to release books and music in time for the holidays. Here’s a quick summary of what I am most looking forward to this fall.

Television

Glee, Wednesdays

Glee is the story of a band of high school outcasts joining together to make a name for themselves by doing the very thing that made them outcasts. When Fox showed the pilot last fall after the finale to American Idol, it was a risky bet to build moment for a show that wouldn’t get aired for another three months. It may have paid off as an estimated 25 million people have now seen the pilot, and the second episode attracted a healthy 7 million watchers, many in the all-important 18-49 demo. This may be one of the few critically adored shows of the last few years to find a broad audience. Even if it doesn’t, Fox is hoping all the promotional tie-ins (cast albums, for instance) will keep this financially lucrative. But why should you watch it? Combining the rigid social hierarchies of high school and the accompanying desires to both fit in and stand out for the right reasons gives you all the drama and comedy you need to make a successful musical. The pilot was one of the strongest in years, deftly reimagining stock characters (the pot-smoking gym teacher, the closeted drama nerd, the bitchy cheerleader) and zipping along at a pleasing pace (helped along by a wonderful vocal score).

Film

The Informant!, Friday, September 18

Steven Soderbergh reunites with Matt Damon in a retelling of a whistle-blower who worked at ADM. But rather than play up the most Grishamesque aspects of the piece, Soderbergh goes for a comic character study of a person who becomes enraptured with his James Bond self-importance. Soderbergh has long achieved a quality I’ve admired in a director, which is the ability to work both inside and outside the studio system. He can make stylish diversions like the Ocean’s Eleven films or gritty indie dramas. Based on Kurt Eichenwald’s book, and with a pudgy, mustachioed Damon, I’m hoping for a really strong comedy with just a hint of social commentary.

Music

Monsters of Folk, Tuesday, September 22

Monsters of Folk is M. Ward, Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Yim Yames (My Morning Jacket), and Mike Mogis. The “get a bunch of folks together to do fun music” has worked well for Beck’s Record Club and it sounds promising here. Traces of Drive-By Truckers and The Jayhawks should shape the sound of this indie-roots supergroup.

Web Video

The Guild

The only regular web video series I’ve found worth staying up on, The Guild is the show that launched writer/producer/star Felicia Day to the pinnacle of nerd stardom (and Twitter). The show centers on online companions who try interacting offline, with very mixed results. You’ll get more of the jokes if you have some familiarity with World of Warcraft and lonelygirl15. If you prefer your television on television, wait until September 29 when seasons one and two are released on DVD.