Concert Review: Muse + Silversun Pickups 3/6

I say there are two paradigms which concerts find themselves in between: physically energized and musically energized.

The musically energized concerts revolve around the emotional arc of the pieces, the dynamic range of the songs, the attention to form and detail and control. The participants are seated, and most audience members sit and listen (or stand, even, although that's more uncommon) to the conflicts and resolutions presented on stage. They live through it, in it, wrapping their minds notes by note over the conclusions that a piece represents, statements and questions and the eternal striving to express.

The physically energized concerts orbit around the physical involvement from the crowd, the force and frenzied power of the songs, attention to the crowd's energy and how to compliment it, and lots and lots of movement. Standing participants get into moshes of various kinds, or just sway around like some form of lava. If you're far enough into the spirit, you get into a place of ecstasy in the meaning and power behind a single motion, a single gesture to a neighbor. "Just give me a scene where the music is free, and the beer is not the life of the party, and there's no need to shit-talk or impress, 'cause honesty and emotion are not looked down upon." is the ideal.

The Flaming Lips are a perfect example of how fucking magical it is when a band can straddle the two. You can have a heartwrenching version of "Taps" to commemorate the loss of life in Baghdad, to immediately segue into a song about "We got the power now, motherfuckers it's where it belongs." You can start with Race for the Prize, which despite its amazing energy manages to be tacit vocally during its chorus, and follow it with applause-driven, slow-and-plaintive-ballad versions of hit songs. Fucking nuts.

Muse aren't that great. In my opinion their new record sucks more than the rest of their catalog, but if you can get behind the irony of 3 upper-middle-class guys from Devon singing about social unrest and third eyes (especially since concerts are the closest thing we have to a Two-Minute's Hate, festivals a Hate Week, in their power to transport and warp) you can revel in all sorts of very very pure energy. That's just their record that puts them so far in the Physically Energized column, but their live shows play on that tenfold.

Silversun Pickups, who opened, didn't strike me that much. Their drummer was solid in what he could do, and so kept a wonderfully steady backbeat, but I learned how to play those licks, those exact amen-break like riffs, in Freshman year. Because he drummed open-handed, the ride was appropriated to the crash position, and the crash was set up in the ride position...6 feet off the ground. He could reach it, sure, but all it allowed him to do was a few flamboyant stick tricks. Beyond him, the keyboard player was good when I could hear him, which was never. I liked the bassist a lot. The guitarist's strum work seemed all-or-nothing: either straight 16ths or sparse hits. Despite all that, they had a very sincere and grateful bent on stage, and so they did their job and played their set and got off. That feeling was helped along a great deal by the lead guitarist, who was swaying his axe back and forth, playing with climax using an echo pedal, and saying "very" about 60 times in "thank you very ... very much" I didn't enjoy their act much, especially when the drummer decided to be the last one to go off, but hell it was fun, and I appreciated them.

As I figure it, the golden age of Muse touring was post- Black Holes and Revelations. They were comfortable enough to reach far back into their catalogue, to start (and NOT end) a show with the bombastic glory of Knights of Cydonia, and then kill everyone with Take a Bow at the end. For a lot of reasons the Resistance album had a large amount of control over the show, which means LESS AWESOME but still cool energy. Setlist from the fanforums:

1. Uprising
2. Resistance
3. New Born
4. Map of the Problematique
5. Supermassive Black Hole
6. Guiding Light
7. Interlude + Hysteria
8. Nishe
9. United States of Eurasia
10. Feeling Good
11. Helsinki Jam
12. Undisclosed Desires
13. Starlight
14. Plug In Baby
15. Time Is Running Out
16. Unnatural Selection
Encore
17. Exogenesis: Symphony Part I (Overture)
18. Stockholm Syndrome
19. Man with a Harmonica intro + Knights of Cydonia

So Resistance tracks make up about 37% of the show, and most of the rest are either greatest stadium hits from a few years back, or instrumental jams from various sources. My main problem with the setlist is the lack of tension. The only song that really held the crowd hostage was the Exogenesis performance, which was brilliantly done...far too late. We were theirs long before that. None of the quieter songs from earlier albums to create tension and release, just BASH BASH BASH loud song loud song loud song. As a crowd we could take it, and we felt well-handled, but they've lost their touch so clear after Black holes and Revelations, to really take us on a journey somewhere...not playing a bunch of songs in an arena.

Not much else, I guess. What a shitty venue, most of all.

Comedown

I've been crashing all of today, half because I was up till 2 and got up at 6:30 for classes.

But, the other half is because Prop One passed in Maine, and now a large group of society of people who love each other very very much cannot get the institutional benefits, societal stability, and personal comfort that comes from a marriage. I'm slightly heartened by the small margin of the victory, as was true in prop eight; currently, the activism power of Human Rights' groups aren't enough to unseat deep-rooted beliefs and fictions about homosexuality or about queer rights. We'll always have Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and soon New Hampshire, but Maine isn't exactly a hotbed of liberalism. So there was a veto.

One of the frustrating things about all this is the strange state of the queer voice in all this. Of all the 10 states with the highest population of LGB (ignoring our Ts and As and Qs, as usual), none of them have gay marriage laws in place; and of the states with the highest percentage population, only 3 do. And then there's fucking Iowa! If Iowa of all places does it, why not Maine, with the 5th highest percent population of LGB folks?

I'd love to take a greater look at other statistical influences here, like religious focus in certain states compared to the results of propositions like Cali's 8 and Maine's 1, but...I'm too busy crying over all of this.

Classical Music: Fuck Yeah!

My teacher and I were delving into a Chopin piece I'm working on, the raindrop prelude (awful name), and not just technically either: we talked a lot about singing, about weight and the transfer of weight, about tone and pulsing tones, about direction, about syntax (holy shit "tempo rubato actually means stolen time...what a wonderful imagery), and most of all about silence. The use of silence which surrounds a piece in the beginning and the end, and the way pieces flow from that: does it break the silence (Polonaises)? does it flow from it (Db prelude)? And even more vitally, how does the piece interact with silence over its course? Tempo is a means of pushing away silence, but the composer can interlace silence with the pattern of notes notes, but the color, the tempo, the everything! So much of 20th century experimentation, like the concept of color-tone melody or Klangfarbenmelodie, was about redefining the nature of the way notes interact, and silence plays a huge role! I thought of Webern, among other composers...and my mind turned to the likes of Grouper and Lichens, and the way they play with silence and repetition, with only a guitar, a sampler, and a voice.

That in turn got me thinking about the role of classical music in society. In American culture, at least, there's such a sense of...elitism attached to it. People are astounded at the high prices of good Symphony seats (I'm going tomorrow ftw), and yet shell out so much more for front-row concert tickets. There are a lot of explanations for why...because of the elitists who claim it as the only true form of music?...because of America's desire to overthrow what was a very European culture, and attempt to redefine it with jazz (huge goddamn irony) and rock'n'roll and pop and all?...because of all the intellectual pressure some music puts on its listener?

And this isn't the modern period of "classical music" that's typically referenced, it's your Baroque, Renaissance, Romantic, and slightly post-romantic stuff that's focused on! All the big names of the past ages. Mozart noticed, Wagner peeked into, and Schoenberg blew wide open the peak to all this atonal shit that can clear out concert halls. The sometimes super-intellectual and dense and distant, the sometimes ugly, the sometimes rapturous and jaw dropping and terrifying sets of sounds that can be passed over, so quickly, as experimentation and junk. And that's not just Europe! Starting with Ives and going into Cage, music feel deep into experimentation far beyond anything in Europe: in the '50s, the aftermath of WWII left dozens of huge names in California, and in the '60s electronic music created a generation of musicians like mathematicians or scientists. There were pieces written that were silence (and motionless Dance accompaniments to them), pieces that comprised of fists smashing keys, music that was all made on tape reels, compositions based on Chinese divination techniques, music scores that were a sentence or two, music that consists of 40 or so violins playing the same note, and slowly, one by one, diverging until a 40 note chord fills the speakers. It's unbelievable! It's horrendous! It's exciting! It's experimental! It's American! It's so rich and can be so amazing! But nobody notices!

Even as folks like Gershwin and Copland tried for the popular feel, there was a retreating faction of composers who retreated into their darkened studio-laboratories. Minimalists like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, who tried to reduce all of music to its corest elements, are despite their attempts still far away from the popular stream. Thus pop music became the norm, and

I'm not saying that any sort of musical degeneration has occurred. That's a bullshit deconstructive useless thing to say! I have a lot more Beatles, or Islands, or Sufjan Stevens, or Bjork, or Ry Cooder, or Anti-Flag, or Sun Ra, or Nine Inch Nails, or mine and my girlfriend's stuff combined than I do Schoenberg or Mozart.

But man, doesn't the stereotypical maniacal, calculated, unemotional, sadistic villain enjoy a dash of classical music while he's slipping on his stereotypical black leather gloves? Isn't the classically-focused elite so often, so joyfully, and so enthusiastically satirized or rejected by pop music, folk music, punk music, metal, noise...despite the fact that the language they use is so similar? Cadence, rhythm, tonality and all that...they're the same!

What I'm saying is, classical music has a really unjust stereotype. Not every band you hear on the radio is worthwhile or interesting; not every one of Mozart's symphonies are amazing transcendent automatically beautiful pieces. That's nostalgia. People have never, ever stopped making good music. But I wish people would search a bit more, and just find certain pieces that really speak to them. To find a way to ignore all the criticism and analysis of classical pieces, as you've learned to ignore that reedy 20-something who runs the counter at your local record store.

There's just so much richness to be found! Why hold yourself back?