Author: mark-richardson

music

Catching a band at the beginning of a tour, when they’ve got a new album and they’re debuting songs onstage, one can often sense the freshness the group brings to the material. The day before this gig, London-based guitar pop band the Clientele had released the sublime God Save the Clientele, a lush collection that brings to mind the melodic craft of bands like Love and The Beatles. They’d been in the States less than a week and were embarking on a month-long, coast-to-coast trip.

What’s all the noise about? The Clientele forge ahead through sound problems at the Satellite Ballroom.

Richmond folk outfit Great White Jenkins opened and were followed by New York’s Ladybug Transistor, a band that, like the Clientele, look to the late ’60s for inspiration, albeit less successfully. The Clientele took the stage as a quartet—singer, guitarist, and songwriter Alasdair MacLean backed by bass and drums and augmented by violinist and keyboardist Mel Draisey. As they launched into “Here Comes the Phantom,” the first track from their latest, it was impressive how well they carried off the song live. MacLean ably transposed to guitar the song’s bouncy piano line, which is reminiscent of the opening from “Daydream Believer,” and his voice sounded fantastic.

But there’s also a downside to catching a band at the beginning of a tour. Though the song selection was ace and performances were good, a short blast of static would periodically come from nowhere (a faulty cord on Draisey’s violin, I was later told). MacLean apologized about sound problems, saying that this was “one of those nights when everything goes wrong, but we’re going to try and make it right.” An hour into the set, as the band played its early single “I Had to Say This,” the static kicked in and wouldn’t leave, overwhelming the audience with a piercing din out of some avant-garde industrial nightmare. The Clientele left the stage, the noise was eventually quieted, and the patient and appreciative audience was able to coax them back for an encore. The band maintained their good humor, as MacLean joked that the ghost of Lou Reed’s noise opus Metal Machine Music was in the house. A quick run through the Television Personalities’ ’80s nugget, “Picture of Dorian Grey,” and the Clientele called it a night, hoping, perhaps, for better luck in the next town.

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The Arcade Fire’s actual music can get lost in the unusual media frenzy that has surrounded the band over the past three years. On the eve of the release of their second album, Neon Bible, both The New Yorker and The New York Times ran lengthy profiles. (Not to mention the adoration that extends far and wide into almost every corner of online media.) With so much attention bestowed on an absurdly sincere and quirky outfit from Montreal signed to the Durham, North Carolina, indie label Merge, it can be difficult to listen to their records as records, and not just documents of a peculiar phenomenon.

Rather than preach to the choir, the Arcade Fire expand their congregation on Neon Bible. Testify!

Neon Bible, setting the hype aside, holds up under such scrutiny. It’s a departure from their first full-length album, Funeral, certainly, but only in terms of focus. Included on the debut were a couple of taut, bass-driven anthems that hinted at early ’80s mutant disco like Talking Heads and served to draw the wary into the fold. Neon Bible comes from a more secure place, just as grandiose but less eager to please. It’s more political, less personal, but every bit as good as Funeral.

Beginning with the lurching “Black Mirror,” which reflects its title in its gothic parlor-room piano and swirling strings, the album looks to classic rock for inspiration, with lyrics focused on maintaining sanity in these chaotic times. “(Antichrist Television Blues)” speaks of planes crashing into buildings two-by-two, but the strummy, slap-echo neo-rockabilly swing is pure early ’80s Springsteen, as are refrains like “You know I’m a God-fearing man.” The epic “No Cars Go” is one of the record’s few completely unhinged moments, with a climax that includes a wordless chorus, orchestra, and lead singer Win Butler chanting, “Women and children—let’s go!” with a slightly creepy messianic fervor. It’s over the top, heck yeah, but Arcade Fire is that kind of band, and they’ll continue to get away with it as long as they keep making albums this good.

music Rock ’n’ roll at its purest is supposed to be loud, raw and (occasionally) a little scary, which explains why so many of the form’s finest practitioners have been unpleasant people with a few screws loose. The three members of the Hoboken, New Jersey-based Yo La Tengo, who played to a sold-out Starr Hill audience last Thursday, are on another trip. Married couple Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley have a working relationship stretching back more than two decades, while Charlottesville native James McNew has been onboard since 1991. They are by all accounts stable, respectable and generally pretty nice, but don’t hold that against them.
Though aged as indie rockers go, Yo La Tengo are still drawn to extreme volume and performance that flirts with chaos. The decibel count on the rave-up “Watch Out for Me Ronnie” had to approach a venue record. Kaplan relished generating sounds in unorthodox ways, whether pounding his elbows on his keyboard during the blistering opener “Sudden Organ” or generating a mess of feedback by rubbing his guitar strings against a mic stand during the epic noise odyssey “Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.” 

The art of noise: Yo La Tengo shake the walls and rattle the floors at Starr Hill.

The energy and joy on display during these moments of rock theater was contagious, but Yo La Tengo impressed equally in their delicate mode. A mid-set string of quieter tunes from the band’s most recent album was met with rapt attention. A few people chattered away during Hubley’s whispery and intimate vocals on “The Weakest Part” while others tried to shush them, but the band didn’t seem to mind; we were in a bar, after all, and the scene during the ballads ultimately was marked by mutual respect. As a whole, the show was a lesson on how a band can continue to grow with artistry and dignity intact, rock mythology be damned.

cd By indie standards, The Shins are huge. They’ve been helped along the way by a catchy tune in a McDonald’s commercial and the words Zach Braff put into the mouth of Natalie Portman in his film Garden State: Surely, The Shins Will Change Your Life will one day be the title of a book about the turn-of-the-millennium rise of independent rock. But The Shins’ greatest strength is that they’ve always seemed like a small band—like your band—even as their first two albums sold very solid numbers for the Sub Pop label.

Which is why the opening few seconds of “Sleeping Lessons,” the first track on their new album, Wincing the Night Away, come as such a shock: There’s a single, spacey synthesizer pulse playing a scale, then the entrance of leader James Mercer’s vocals, sounding (with the studio processing) like he spent last year listening to Thom Yorke’s solo album. An acoustic guitar eventually folds in, followed by big, electric power chords until we find ourselves in the middle of a hugely appealing (and huge) rock song. The Shins, suddenly, don’t sound so small. But then the following track, “Australia,” feels more like the Shins of old, with its bouncy acoustic guitar strum and instantly appealing, singalong melody; the mid-tempo, Smiths-like “Phantom Limb” is almost as catchy.

The Shins, former small fish of the indie rock world, upgrade to a bigger pond with 2007’s Wincing the Night Away.

Clearly, the tunefulness of the band’s songwriting is what carries the day, no matter how their sound changes. So it’s disturbing when this quality begins to flag somewhere near the album’s midpoint. The ethereal mood piece, “Black Wave,” pokes around the edges of a structure without committing; the dirge-like “Split Needles” is modern rock for the working man and little more. These duffs would stand out less if The Shins weren’t so admirably committed to economy, with the 11 songs here whipping by in just over 40 minutes. For half an album, The Shins sound bigger and better than ever, but then something unnameable happens. Their sound has lost some personality and, for a band like The Shins, that counts for a lot.