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.

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.