Future of the Left @ Grog Shop, Cleveland

Future of the Left
Setlist (rough order):

• Arm Eritrea
• Chin Music
• adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood,
• Beneath the Waves, an Ocean
• Small Bones, Small Bodies
• Sheena is a T-Shirt Salesman
• Manchasm
• Failed Olympic Bid
• You Need Satan More Than He Needs You
• To Hell With Good Intentions
• Robocop 4
• Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues
• Lapsed Catholics + I Trusted You (total 10m20s)

I think it makes sense to start at the end. Just like the final tracks of every mclusky / FotL album thus far, Lapsed Catholics has a little bit of something extra in it. What we read as complexity, as layered meanings, as the depth of the music, lies completely in the intro: when you hear the song cut off from the intro, you're left with an excited 3 (maybe 4) note melody with inspiringly uninspired structure. And it can just keep going, like "I Trusted You" just keeps going. It's a massive joke of media, something that postmodern theorists could dismantle than I could. The onstage antics (I remember little except the drum kit moving to the other side of the stage, Jimmy (Mr. "play guitar and act like a fucking maniac") stage-kissing an adolescent, and Julia playing bass. But was all (a) appropriate to the crowd (there were a few chants of "anal sex" from shitty dudebros in the back) and (b) much appreciated and reciprocated. It was 10m20s (better than NYC's 7m48s, if Falco can be believed, which he can't) of a sharing that had been going on all along from an up-front crowd of devoted fans and a mid-section of excited dilettantes of shit rock.

There's an element of absurdism to all of their music. Not just absurdism in the Monty Python or randominternet sense, but in the theatrical sense: carefully crafted, inevitable, often disturbingly engrossing absurdism. What first turned me off from The Plot Against Common Sense was how explicit it got against its targets, or how limp certain conclusions are (I cite "Beneath The Waves, An Ocean," to which I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt, but from which I'm still getting  little but an unexciting invitation to clap your hands); repeated listens are helping to unearth the gems, which are many, and to try to reveal some deeper layers. But I think I'm also butting up against my expectations not just of what, but of how I expect their indirectness to function. Of course if you drop a bandmate and add two more things are going to start working differently. Sometimes I think the band's ceaseless use of ironic distance is the epitome of everything I hate about musical culture, positive cathedrals of irony...and then Lapsed Catholics. Just, simple as shit. Listen to what's there.

It helped to have a small but devoted crowd. The AJJ crowd was everyone but some drunks and me asleep in the corner (having exhausted myself singing along and kicking men out of the pit), and the audience space got pretty unsafe. A good pit is contained, not a swaying wreck of shin-bruising person-trampling madness. And I think the band loved Cleveland's rowdyness, as articulated by the vanguard front row but wholeheartedly enjoyed by the rest of the crowd. It allowed the crowd interaction to be as sleek and quick as their music and the turns it takes.

This was a long set for an opening band, doing a lot of old stuff in a tour for a new record that's getting shit all over the place. Talking to Jack later, apparently it's getting exhuasting to be pulling the new stuff all over the place; I hope that's not a function of audiences not responding to the songs, or getting disappointed. I'll admit, getting to hear the band play two mclusky songs and my favorites from Curses and Travels (except for "Plague of Onces" and "Drink Nike," rest their souls) was a once-in-a-lifetime treat, but a touring band deserves to work, apply, and get reception for material that represents who they are now. Not that they aren't owning everything. I got vague word that they're continuing to write and that something might come out from them next year.

But throughout, every track, every second of that wonderful night: pseudo cockrock; explicit and implicit moments of theater; hooks and patterns accessible to new listeners and hypnotic to old; wild work at high tempos and mesmerizing work at low; carefully uncrafted stage banter; and much much else, but it all seems to center back on rock'n'roll.

9/20: Girlyman @ The Cat in the Cream

There's a genre I've gotten whiffs of over the course of concerting. Queers tend to do it real well, and large groups of people do it well. Large groups of queerios tend to do it best. I'm thinking Dangerous Ponies and The Gertrudes and (my own) Speaker for the Dead. It's a genre based in pop/rock, but focused on mashing a variety of different experiences together on stage; or maybe it's about making standard and beautiful songs about things that don't often get beautiful songs. I think that's what Girlyman mean by gender pop. I heard nothing that astounded me tonight, but I heard a lot of excellent musicianship, different influences, and a rare sense of community around being sexual/gender-expressive others.

The stage lay open with a variety of instruments for the four musicians: acoustic guitars, electric guitar, electric bass, mandolin, banjo, keyboard. This music wasn't sneakily or smoothly diving between their parts like, say, Plume Giant; instead the instrumentation, and the songwriting, was like seeing pleasant different faces of the same dodecahedron or something.

Quite notable also are the consistent 3-part harmonies, usually voicings of a single chord moving to occasional close dissonances. It was this that bound their pop together, which was always reminiscent, though particularly with the keyboard piano patch, of that of Ben Folds. We even got the three of them directing the crowd in 3-part harmonies of their own on "Postcards from Mexico." Even though they lack Ben Folds' overstatement of the same ideas over and over (some songs ended far too quickly to make sense), the need for unified harmony and texture in each of the songs (necessary to make good pop lyrics fly) meant that their fabulous individual musicianship often got lost in the changes, each supporting the other in a whole that was often expectable, not stellar.

But...that's pop. And to that pop they added a variety of personal experience, covers, varied key regions and approaches, music for sexual minorities coming into their own. They're also really, really fucking good at that pop, and really good at each other. They made composing on-the-spot tuning songs, vocal harmonies and all, seem effortless. Maybe it's musical talent and effort that would be better spent in another form, but then, one's studio work can be totally different from one's live work. This music means a lot to a lot of people, and it's well done, facile, often clever in its changes and instrumentation. Stuff like this doesn't always need to break the mold.

So a good time was had by all, with an encore and a standing ovation, a bunch of CDs, and friendly talk with fans and friends after the show. They're on their final tour before a break. I'm excited to spin the CD I got, but more than that I'm excited to follow these musicians into the things that feel right for them.

9/15: Owen Pallett @ Supercrawl

Owen's been doing other things for a while, so this Supercrawl show felt like a return in a whole host of ways. The work that he's done with the band hasn't been presented so visibly and so widely to a North American audience yet; in a way this was make or break. The kernel of new material shone brightly, maybe or maybe not hiding the new directions "the classics" have taken. It's a return for me too; the last time I was in Toronto was an extended mental breakdown culminating in Owen's July show. It was something else back then, but I got a chance to chill out and actually listen this time.

I know how different a touring headspace can be from a composing and recording headspace, and it was a cold and haggard night. Owen performed admirably, but I came for the ideas, not just for the new material, but the songs I've seen live 7 times in the light of tomorrow, wherever that is. I'm trying to make sense of what I'm hearing, and from this concert, there's a lot Owen's been putting on the table for a while, lots of projects on top of his arrangement work, that'll be swept up into whatever happens next.

SETLIST

1. Scandal At The Parkade (solo)
2. In Conflict
3. Midnight Directives
4. Soldier's Rock
5. Tryst With Mephistopheles
6. Infernal Fantasy
7. The Riverbed
8. This Is the Dream of Win and Regine
9. Lewis Takes Off His Shirt
10. The Great Elsewhere

Encore

1. E is for Estranged
2. The Man With No Ankles

 Some thoughts

In Conflict
Swelling, rotating arco+pizz pattern in close intervals with an incredible amount of momentu. Diving through dirty synth swells, sparse at other times. There's a funk-styled freedom to the bassline, but also one shifting under the weight of a high pedal tone. There's definitely polytonality (a la Ives, for example, mixing the same or recognizable figures in different keys, lending itself to a disorienting but not overly unpleasant sense of collage) and quarter tones in there somewhere.

Having seen Owen play with Les Mouches before, nothing here felt very new to me; for my thoughts from last year's Toronto performance, go here. However, I did not before appreciate the freedom the band grants Owen. Just in the form and in the technology, looping requires a basis of some figure which informs, if not determines, the tonality of every other passage you play. When Owen goes on the fan forums talking about repetitive music, I think that implies using smaller, and therefore more flexible, nuggets of material. Less melody and more pedal point or cantus firmus. The band is there to turn it into a song, of which the looping is an integral but on-its-own-powerless part.

Midnight Directives
I remember that MD used to be the last track of Heartland under a different name and title; there's still something very different about it from the rest of the album to me, something I think Owen's exploiting. The piece is a collection of moments, in relation to the 5th/tritone drone and the quick/unreachable pizz, but still fractured. On the recording the strings swoop in arco, pop out, come back pizz, leave room for a bassoon scale, none of it in a unit until the final moments. It fits together as a disoriented expansive mess.

Building off of IC, the band gives Owen a powerful but flexible means with which to create distinct moments from the loops. With less orchestral material to fill in, the song strips down into a collage of these moments, taut and flinging near each other. The buildup to "bit of meat" should be a climax, but it's a false peak, a structural deceptive cadence, probably leading to the most cacophany of most of his songs; the band does a lot of extra repetition of the next climax in order to bind it back together aesthetically enough to finish. The music becomes about the exchange between subdivisions, of the smallest moments refusing to be tied structurally to a monolithic whole. This is small music.

Soldier's Rock
The lyrics changed! And everything changed a little bit. Matt was onstage with a Mopho synthesizer, which increased the depth of the synth play around the song. Still linear, still funky, but the outro took that regularity and smashed it up against the wall. Owen was ripping at the violin (did a bowstring come off at this song, or earlier?), tearing away at antitonal passages. More than anything, the song gives an insight into the violence of Owen's lyrics and writing. There are bits and pieces being posted on the fanforums' sticky, and they're juicy juicy bits.

Tryst w/ Mephistopheles
So, what are the artistic implications of krautrock? What are the challenges and the flexibilities of the genre, what does the m.o. do to the material which lives within it? There's something common to both Jazz and to classical music that minimalism in its broadest sense, some kind of stripping down or stripping away, had to happen before new complexity could be built. I'm thinking of Sun Ra's unrestraint and the Marsalis family, or the vogue of minimalism which is now diffused into pop film scores and the cogs of overwrought compositional cathedrals alike. I think Krautrock takes that crisis, leans toward minimalism a bit, but adds the drums to make it fun.

Tryst begins with a fifth and a drumbeat and a bassline on the root. Everything else has a time and a place to remove itself from that order. The band accented the sense of entrapment this approach to material can generate. We'd like there to be a lyrical breakout of song, but the melody will keep on descending until it reaches hell, or repeat itself dancing in circles to its eventual death (and lack of interest), but everything is too carefully controlled. The most powerful moments for me, when the violin recasts that open fifth into major and minor modes at a stroke, and when the breakdown bass pattern returns to close the song, are moments which just barely seem to break out, but get caught back into the fold.

Infernal Fantasy
There's a romantic energy to the piece, the arpeggios feel inspired from the accompaniments to lieder. There are moments of breakout rock to punctuate, but this is a very short song which makes its tense and charged point as quickly as possible. It's maybe the most cousin (if not by blood) to Midnight Directives on the stock of new songs. The dissonances mixed between those streams of notes sound even more disturbing

Riverbed
I really don't know what to say. This song came out of nowhere, it wasn't even "Dark Behind The Sky" which was performed in Japan. It begins with a drum machine, setting expectation and crescendoing but dropping out before the violin enters. The violin pattern...okay. Take "Wake Up," and marry it shotgun. Fill it with booze and pills and the violent monotony of your daily life, corrupt it slowly with promises of love. Ruin it and everything it stands for, slash its voice, and leave it stuck and cold on the street when you're done. Supply bass and drums and let it sing. That's what you're working with here.

Win/Regine
The clearest thing about this crowd-pleaser for me is that, if the band wanted it to be so, it could sound exactly like the recording on Has a Good Home, all the hand claps and swells. But it don't, and it won't. Rob's to thank I think (his astonishing percussion work is everything I want to be in a backing performer). He pays attention instead to rhythmic density and intensity and interchange, not the clearer romantic sweep of timbre and pitch that accompany some bands' crescendos.

Scandal / ... / LTOHS + Elsewhere + Estranged + Ankles
I stopped taking notes and wrote "TOO BUSY MOSHING" once "Shirt" started. What that meant was "too busy moshing with myself," which meant more of "too busy navalgazing and mouthing lyrics to function." I had a lot of fun and couldn't really pick out much to say. In retrospect, Owen knew where to put the new stuff for maximum effectiveness, and despite all the innovations in dissonance and everything else, Owen kept these ones pretty straight. It was heartening. No matter what work he does, he wants to perform and have his work performable, and is willing to end sets like this. And even then, Ankles didn't exist two years ago, and now it's the crowd-pleasing finale.

---

So: polytonality, pedal points / cantus firmi vs. ostinati, collage, subdivision, violence, entrapment, rhythm, dissonance. Another thing, from listening to the recordings above (thanks to vestenet), it's all really fucking fast. The best thing to get your ear ready might be Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet 1931. Crawford Seeger worked a lot around dissonance, working in a style called "dissonant counterpoint" and proposing systems where everything tonal was replaced with something antitonal, i.e. dissonances are good and consonances are meant to pass between dissonances but not take focus. The logic of her 3rd and 4th movements (linked) are strict in their logic much in the way that looping forces a strict logic; they are also wildly inventive and disturbing, powerful in their closeness to something that sounds just barely natural. If you don't like it, play along with a maraca and see how you feel (dat tactile pulse).

It was only after I got back from the show that I saw Owen had posted a few of his own comments about the music and setlist for that night. Choice: "very loud and distorted but in a soothing beautiful way," "Old songs sound exploded like "you set Heartland on fire and a phoenix emerges" - Kevin. New songs sound "better than your old songs, like, kill them dead." - Ben." The new tunes are part of a handful that'll supposedly be on the record out next year. There's a lot to prepare, for all of us, I think. If we're into what's happening, then we shouldn't neglect thinking about what's gotten Owen there, the events and travels and other kinds of festivals and performance engagements. He's been gathering widely from the opportunities presented, and I think we'll be all the richer for it.

Plume Giant

I had no idea who these people were before I walked in the door of the show our band was opening. Such a fucking gift.  Plume Giant.

They are a trio in the truest sense of the word. Every song is testing the range of skills each of them have, and what they can switch between. The interest of the music comes not just from their individual talents, but in the sense of flexibility and range of expression that each of them have. Maybe that feeling comes from their control and technique, but there's also something in light and crisp folk music that lends itself well to the ear: there are so few performers, so many instrumental breaks, and such different instrumentation that nothing could be muddy. Their level of technique is such that it needn't even be commented on; it was such that the quickness of their minds, of their powerful arrangements and inventions, and of the often rambling non-repetitive structure of their music, that shone through their technique like a prism. It was like watching 3 similarly-trilingual people speaking three different languages and understanding each other perfectly. The vocalist/violinist/organist/tambouriner, the guitarist/main-vocalist, and the violist/guitarist/vocalist.

There's a lovely kind of quick-wittedness to their music. They rely on the virtuosity of their performance, the switching between instruments, and their beautifully executed 3-part harmonies to draw the listener in. It's brilliant; it's also showy magic that allows a more relaxed approach to structuring songs. Sometimes that worked brilliantly, but other times the pieces sagged under their own weight. A classically-trained jazz-aware approach to simple folk progressions and storytelling can mean pretty gestures, or it can mean deeply meaningful links of pretty gestures, and I got both. It made me realize how much my music and the bands I play in rely on ostinati and a certain set "sound" for a piece in order to function. There's a bravery in evolution, something I hear in some of Joanna Newsom's best scores as well. Pop is more about the unification of texture, maybe, whereas folk is more about using often-limited resources (voice+guitar, small acoustic ensemble) to create however much variation on a message that's necessary/worthwhile. And this was all invention on strong cores and it was all, all, all great.

8/22: Locria + Little War Twins + SFTD // Styk + ACLU Benefit + Perfumeman + Math the Band

Worcestor is the second largest city in New England. Its sister cities are Worcestor, England; Piraeus, Greece; Pushkin, Russia; Afula, Israel; and, depending on who you talk to, Detroit, MI. I've gotten to pop through the city on a bike passing by and a bandmate working. More thoughts on Speaker for the Dead later, but mainly I've been introduced to a complicated music scene with a young generation on the rise. I felt at times, half naked, sweaty, painted and hoarse, like I was one of the cool kids I always wanted to be at shows, but the devotion to the local scene is worth much more than anybody's delusions. These were two shows, overlapping somewhat, at 97D on Webster and and the Firehouse.

Locria
I'd heard of them through Zack Shaw, a wonderful songwriter, guitarist and tourmate, this being work very different from the pop-punk overtones of The Hotel Year. Mainly I was enthralled by the interplay between the guitars, and how smooth and neither-boring-nor-predictable the breakdowns were. The jamming/proggy bits didn't hit me as much as the tighter songs, but then again, the bassist didn't know the last song very well and did a fantastic job working it all out.

Little War Twins
Hadn't heard of them, though I missed their sharing the stage with The Furies and Bright, the Morning, two wonderful area bands. A 5(ish) piece act fronted by an acoustic guitarist, flanked by a violinist and an electric guitarist often with slide in hand. The result was a set of flexible textures, most remarkable for its ability to swandive gracefully into hard fucking breakdowns and pop back out again. Although I'm not sure how their synergy was as a band, they were certainly tight, and each had powerful and well-understood roles within the band, with a kind of love-infused proclamation riding the lyrics. Kind of like their friends and tourmates Fifth Nation, their spiritual bent isn't my thing, but it clearly provides a center for a rock-solid band.

SFTD - we. kicked. ass.

//

STYK + ACLU Benefit
Missed the set to arrive there and get into the nitty-gritty about personal safety and community responsibility within these music venues, and within the scene as a whole. Apologies! As for ACLU Benefit, the Stephen Merritt comparisons are justified.

Perfumeman
Got really pumped for these two from their rig: drum sequencer, floor tom, mics, cello with looping pedal setup. It was a beautifully flexible set, jumping between beat driven fatalist pop and queer ditties without disturbing. The fog and lasers were not too distracting, there were some but not-enough embracings of musical anarchy, too much flirting, I was more focused on the looping rig. A touring band doing the good work from Denver, moving some butts with a tight aesthetic, good luck to them.

Math the Band
A famous band never heard of, chiptune dance pop gods in their own right, two hard rocking musicians with a good sense of theatrics and a great sense of beat. They were apparently worried about SFTD stealing their Thunder, on a Wednesday night after a recent Andrew W.K. tour in a cooler venue. Despite all the intersections of hype and expectation, they wiped everything clean with their dextrous but often-still-free-to-mess-with-people hands. Perhaps not a permanent butt-moving experience of a night, but only as many butts as you feel need to rocked at the moment.

Centipede Hz: Stream of Consciousness

Moonjock: pulse like you mean it, pulse like we don’t know what meter is, lay the vocals across it like it’s the easiest thing. we know when the radio set’s ended. it’s disappointing to lose the bass and drop into 4/4, building the energy back together to jump around like you’re someone flipping the volume on the radio in rhythm. I don’t feel what you’re developing but when the bass dives back I wonder if maybe the crescendos will blow out my ears with headphones. at the very least you’ve made a music of density and lack thereof. the album rises from the synthy muck just as much as from the list of influences.

Today's Supernatural: chick choom. the kind of energy it takes to drop the beat away on your “lelelelelelet”s is the same it takes to drive the arpeggios together. MPP never really gave up on its sense on silence. It’s not that you haven’t been this tight before, but you’re not just pushing the tempos up, you’re dancing more clearly in front of the eye. I feel like you trust me more, undistorted and playing on regular beats with handclaps. It’s not about pop, trying to genrify into that is either a tautology or useless. you’re straying too far from your hook and that’s part of your game, to spread us out and make us feel lost even while we know that the rhythm is something almost too familiar to the radio. nice accelerating part; rhythm is still in your control, your god to toy me with.

Rosie Oh: and you start a third groove and it’s corrupted from the start, and the halo of noise becomes more interesting and worthwhile as the passenger’s more worth it than the car. you’re opposing what your bass is plucking out and its rocky progressions and drifting into them when you feel, riding the synths back in and out. this is music of attention, attention is the manipulated factor, the pitch and timbre are a harmonic language that-

Applesauce: oh this one’s pretty. nice use of “lil honey” to draw intensity from what was just a little push. in some ways this sounds like their first record with the tempos up and synths up, is that the same bass tone? this song I could get into forever, progressing from part to part holding my hand a lot more than the earlier ones. I’m not quite bored yet, I wonder if the word for what you’re doing in spinning out these parts is in “progressive” or in “epic” (as in, the theater, and Of Montreal’s fortspinnung) or in “collage” since the parts don’t quite fit together in a really refreshing way, like there’s a bit of modulation to get from one instrumentation and chord progression to another, a certain amount of potential energy to overcome. a lot of these songs repeat themselves a lot! goodness guys I can’t hear the differences between the repeats on these speakers. the song winds down  to counting and four-on-the-floor with the 12/8 you hint at flitting about like a ghost.

Wide Eyed: wispy whispery. a contained rocket-arpeggio, an engine. you use tricks like this to hide the quicker pulses, like there’s some 14-year old drum student tapping out double-tap rolls behind each song that you phase in and out or something. not literally. nice use of the bass  to alter and compress the groove. these songs could go so many more places, at the same time! they could lose some of their structural redundancy and each generate enough material (pleasant motivic redundancy, Mozart!) to kick around for 8-9 minutes. who’s singing? this song paces about in its pen for a bit and then never really gets out, brings you down into it kinda.

Father Time: starting without mama bass! you oh my good just insert yourself where needed. you’re clearly working with the same materials in all of these songs, using idioms that blink briefly into the most intense beat you’ve ever heard and dropping itself back into a stable home for what a “song” should be. 

New Town Burnout: up and down, up an down, up a down. the rhythm’s only the most stressed and tentative of glues, the road and the empty space, slowly populated by motion and by sync with the rising density of the vocals.  this is fun, this is fun, this is easy too. when you drop it all out like that, though, it’s not as exciting, it’s built into us and we never really lose it, it doesn’t have the same tension as your “leleles.”

Monkey Riches: Please get into some glitch here PLEASE it would make my day, I want it to come! I don’t want every facet of how you can mix things together and turn your face away from the massive cathedral-in-process-of-collapsing house of rhythm that this could be. once you get used to this, there’s no drama I can hear…am I asking the wrong things? you get to a great place at the end of that one!

Mercury Man: oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh that that that that that that “sounds like she’s talking to me on the phone” I’m in love with the groundwork for this one, if this is what your formulas can do then I do not mind, I can not mind the crown this jewel is in. kick stop! kick stop! woooooeoeoeo.

Pulleys: I don’t have much else on the rest of these. They invent themselves in clever ways that I can’t quite pinpoint right now, it sounds like the subtlties are worth diving into, I can’t quite hear what the currents of synths are doing to carry the sounds along. This feels like something very new in pop, something not in the 2k0s, hinted at in Radiohead and Sufjan’s last releases, something using a quieter language to make louder things, a decade of whirring and silence and loops.

Amanita: there was another song! it was fine.