Cutting through the hyperbole often associated with popular unpopular music.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
MFR's Top 10 of Pitchfork's Top 100 Songs
Pitchfork came out yesterday with their list of the 100 best tracks of 2008 (read it here). We thought we'd narrow it down a bit in the most arrogant way possible: Here are our Top 10 of Pitchfork's Top 100 Songs.
A Million Years Later: Pitchfork 2008 - Nights Two and Three
Due to a previously-arranged special occasion, I was unable to make most of night 3. However, what I did see that day was perhaps one of the best sequenced part of the entire festival. But before we get there, we have to get through Saturday. For the sake of consolidation, I've decided to put day two and day three together; for the sake of brevity, all bands will be reviewed in 100 words or less. It's summation time!
Saturday
It terms of mainstage action, Saturday was characterized by having some of the most hyped bands on the website perform, including Fleet Foxes (mp3) and Vampire Weekend (MP3via). I arrive promptly at 12:30, and make my way immediately to where Stage B was last year, near the east side of Ashland. Only its not there. Smartly, the festival has moved it to the other side of the field, where there's more space for spectators to stand. However, this means that I have to bust a move to catch the Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar. I'm glad I did. The 10-piece band fuses Latin-Caribbean music with a whole host of other genres, the most novel and interesting of which was a ska-polka version of "Hava Nagila". If there's any sub-genre of music that needs to take off, it's African music made with klezmers. The Orkestar played for a small, but very enthusiastic crowd.
Most of the performances that followed turn to be of good-but-not-great quality. However, day two starts out with the best of those sets, that being Titus Andronicus (MP3via). The Jersey-based band was one of the most raucously catchy groups at the festival, and Andronicous' blasts of anthemic pub-rawk rang loudly throughout the good-natured crowd. However, their energetic live show doesn't change the fact that this band owes its entire career to side A of The Clash. Also, four guitarists? No.
I then returned to the B-stage to catch Eastern-folksters A Hawk and A Handsaw (mp3), featuring former Neutral Milk Hotel member Jeremy Barnes. However, after the group appears to be having some technical difficulties, and they won't come on for quite a bit. So, in the meantime, I make my way over to the Connector stage, where garage-rock man Jay Reatard begins by speeding through a whiplash-inducing array of Marshall-stack induced mania. But, 20 minutes or so in, it becomes clear that if I've heard one song, I've heard most of them. On Singles Going Steady. Still, the audiences' eyes were absolutely transfixed on Reatard, and that kind of stage presence is something you can't buy.
Back to the closing moments of Handsaw, which enforces the notion that stage B will be where the curious will go. And, speaking of things that get cats killed, the patient echo-laden drone-scapes emerging from the Aluminum stage. The band was Caribou (mp3), who, as a friend of mine put it, somehow emerged from an electronic duo to a totally kick-ass rock band. It certainly proved to be a perfect balance between the passing melancholy of the overcast day, and the bright emergence of the re-appearing sun. The group used jam-band style repetition and calm, ocean-blue guitar tones to appeal to the festival audience. That sense of calm continues with Fleet Foxes, a group that strives to be the next Crosby, Stills and Nash. They succeed in crafting sky-wide harmonies that seem to reach for the heavens. If there's ever a version of the Odyssey that does a gender switch on the Sirens, cast these guys in the part. However, on the songwriting front, the group is still stuck to the traditional structures of old gospel music. As a result, what could be brilliant music is merely passable and breezy.
Fuck Buttons (mp3via) slowly-blossoming supernova of white-noise proves to be ideal listening for your bedroom, but live show can be taken or left. Same goes with Atlas Sound (mp3via) and, later on, No Age (mp3). While both acts crafted what I regard as my favorite records of the year, the introspective nature of both albums prove to be ill-suited to an outdoor festival.
Ditto Vampire Weekend who, while on record are quite upbeat, slowed things down a bit at the festival. The tracks sounded more in line with classic reggae than with Afro-pop. The performance is adequate. Dizzee Rascal, however, brings the heat and passion by blasting through one grime classic after another. Ruby Suns (mp3) prove to be an Afro-Cuban Fleet Foxes, which help one release the potential of the latter if they branch out.
Treading back to Elf Power on the Balance stage, I see the band perform one of the most straightforward sets at the festival; it's also one of the least interesting. Much more invigorating are !!! who, despite the annoying tendencies of singer Nick Offer, turn in one of the more energetic live shows of the festival. Now that the Dismemberment Plan are dead and gone, someone has to be the second coming of the Talking Heads. While Craig Finn may have done the dance-punk thing before with Lifter Puller, but The Hold Steady don't have time for grooves. There's rockin' that needs to be done, and that's what The Hold Steady did, putting in new tracks from Stay Positive in with older songs, including an apt "Chicago Seemed So Tired Last Night". That's because you wore us out, broseph.
Speaking of worn out, that's how I was for the performances of Jarvis Cocker and Animal Collective. The droll humor of the former was a nice change-of-ace; and the psychedelic lullabies from another planet of the latter were enough to put me to sleep (in a good way); "Peacebone" was a highlight of both Animal Collective's set, and of the festival itself.
Sunday
Since I couldn't make it for most of Sunday, we're just gonna do this one 50-words-or-less style.
The Dodos (Mp3): Leading off with some of the stranger tracks from Visiter, the band then settles into a groove where they can become a locomotive train of multi-part harmonies, open-ended alternate tunings, and prog-metal percussion. Singer sweats like Nixon; audience reciprocates the passion that the band puts into its life performance.
Occidental Dance Bros. International(mp3): West-African Sambas by way of the Windy City, the clean guitar-tones, leap-frogging bass lines, and melodious saxophones prove to be, with auxiliary percussion, a combination that's both soothing and exciting; cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle" was a crowd-pleaser.
M. Ward (MP3): The indie alt-country broheim performs songs from his breakthrough 2006 effort Chinese Translation. At the risk of sounding ageist, this was the most Dad-friendly set of the fest. Ward seems to work best with a collaborator (say, Zooey Deschanel). By himself? Well...
Ghostface Killah and Raekwon: Compared to Dizzee's bounce-off-the-wall grime and PE's revolution-as-spectacle, the Wu's brand of beautifully damaged stoner kung-fu hip-hop sounds a little plodding, if not lethargic. But the crowd responds enthusiastically to past favorites like "Ice Cream", and the duo is more than eager to give the crowd what it wants (except that guy who requested "Kilo").
Spirtualized (mp3): Jason Pierce almost auditioned for the great gig in the sky. Good thing he didn't get it. Otherwise, listeners wouldn't have had the priviledge of hearing the dream-pop-gone-gospel songs in A, or E for that matter. Stunning, gorgeous. "Baby, set my soul on fire". You have no idea. One of the best of P4K.
Bon Iver mp3): You know how I was talking about Atlas Sound, and how his contemplative bedroom-pop isn't necessarily suited to the outdoors? Same prob here. Poor guy also had Spiritualized bleeding into his show. That said, muscled-up tunes from Emma sounded good.
Dinosaur Jr.: Reunited, and it still feels pretty good. Songs old and new blend in comfortably, and the group even plays post-Barlow tracks like "Feel The Pain". However, vintage material rules the night, as "Little Fury Things" and "Freak Scene" have a certain hardcore-derived edge that latter works do not (good-natured as they may be).
Hey gang. Even though the festival ended three or four days ago, and most of the other blogs have given their thoughts and feedback about Pitchfork 2008. But hey, my name means nothing if it isn't Johnny Relevance. So, here we go. My review of the third incarnation, starting with the very first night, which saw arty post-punk titans perform their confrontational classic Vs.; Sebadoh perform their blossoming-into-legit-songwriters lovelorn break-up album Bubble and Scrape; and finally, revolutionary hip-hop act performed their radical classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
First, lets begin with Burma.
Mission of Burma
The strange thing about Burma to me is that, as I was arriving to Pitchfork and being greeted by the smooth sounds of Curtis Mayfield, I think they're maybe one of the few, if not only, bands in rock music to have their career resuscitated by a book. Out of the many excellent chapters in Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, the one detailing the rough existence of Mission of Burma, the Boston-based art-noise post-punk group, was the one that piqued my curiosity (as well of that of my like-minded friends) the most. After all, it was the first time I had heard of the group.
Obviously, it wouldn't be the last. Since getting back together in the early 2002, Burma has picked up right where it left off, issuing out two stellar comeback albums: 2004's OnOFFon and 2006's The Oblierati. Incredibly, those are only their second and third full-length albums. Their debut LP, Vs., was the first record that was the center of attention for the first night of Pitchfork 2008.
Sadly, for a band that had played the festival two years early for a packed audience, there were a scant amount of people at the start of the performance. Thankfully, that would change over the course of the night, and the vast amount of people who would trickle in during Burma's performance were treated to a mammoth wall of noise and melody. And, from note one, listeners could immediately tell how colossally influential Burma, and Vs., were, and are, to the punk-rock landscape. With the chaotic caterwaul of instruments, each playing in alternate time signatures, it wasn't hard to ascertain that Burma were the proto-math-rock group.
Indeed, as Burma played more and more songs from their record, it was easier and easier to tell where, and how, subsequent groups cribbed their stylistic tendencies from Burma. (Speaking of tendencies, albeit ones closer to self-mutilation, singer Roger Miller's quotation of "Institutionalized"? Awesome).
Essentially, the style cribs go like this: alternate time-signatures with screaming on top = Shellac. (Although Steve Albini is such a force of personality that Shellac hardly deserve to be declared rip-offs). Group sing-yells over punk-rock anthems = Fugazi. (Although Ian McKaye and company absolutely deserve credit for adding golden-age-of-hip-hop style call-and-responses to the mix). Also, there's the songs. My god, the songs. While the night for Burma ("Welcome to the Burmadome!") would begin in free-form musical anarchy, as opposed to that controlled musical anarchy that we all know and love, the band drifted more toward conventional style of songwriting on the album. But not too conventional. Even though Vs. contains none of their "hits" ("Academy Fight Song", "That's When I Reach For My Revolver"), the album shows how tight and taut Burma can be with their lockstep variation of melodic hardcore.
The band's stumbling, punchdrunk variation of punk-rock is distinctive for two reasons: the heavy emphasis on three-downbeats in a row, which gives the band a unique feel similar to a boxer stumbling after being delivered a heavy blow, but still maintaining his ground. The second is (bassist name) approach to playing bass. He uses double-stops (a two-note chord; doesn't have to necessarily be powerful in nature) and a tone that's heavy on the treble. This, I feel, is the source of a lot of the angst in Burma songs. It's a sound that's both powerful and quaking with fear. While Vs. becomes more reflective and introspective on its second side, the band didn't lose any of its intensity as a live act, nor its stinging sense of humor. (After one particularly impressive display of lung power, drummer _ dryly stated "Very well-expressed, Mr. Miller"). Also, the group showed a true sense of humility, stating that the crowd knew the record better than they did after the band began the wrong song. While Vs. may be at times difficult and impenitrible, anyone experiencing the album for the first time couldn't have gotten a better introduction from a band that, two-decades after its inception, is just hitting its stride. Mission of Burma are proof that not only do American lives have second acts, but that those acts can be even better than the first. Suck it long and hard, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Sebadoh
Speaking of suck, here's an exchange between my girlfriend and me that aptly sums up both of our feelings regarding Sebadoh's hap-hazard and ramshackle performance of their transitional LP Bubble and Scrape:
Me: "Wait, did that song just end?" GF (exasperated sigh): "Did it ever begin?"
While the material performed certainly had its merits, the way it was performed was rather annoying. I'm all for a band performing on stage after however-many-years to enjoy themselves, but being a spectator at the trio's recital of Bubble and Scrape was like being a third wheel. Lou Barlow looked like he was having fun, and god bless him for it, but would it have killed Sebadoh just to sped things up a bit? To his credit, Barlow and company looked like they were enjoying themselves. I just wished I could say the same of the audience at times.
For those of you who may not know, Sebadoh was former Dinosaur Jr. bassist Lou Barlow's side project, an outlet for his songs when J. Mascis became too dominant in the creative process. Once Barlow got the proverbial pink ship from Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh became his main gig. Because of the intentional, warts-and-all minimalism of the early Sebadoh recordings such as The Freed Man and Weed and Forestin', Sebadoh, like Pavement, are considered pioneers of a sub-genre of indie-rock called lo-fi. I imagine that anyone reading this blog knows what that term is, but I present these facts to get to a larger point. Quick, what is the defining characteristic of lo-fi? Intimacy. And what quality of character is least likely to be found in a sea of 40-80,000 people? You guessed it. Frank Stallone Intimacy.
So, instead of pondering how and where Bubble and Scrape served as a transitional album to their arguable pinnacle Bakesale, a record that found the band's songwriting at its most focused and direct, we got to see three dudes fucking around on a stage. Which can have its charms, on a very, very small scale. But on at platform that sees you in a antagonistically musical sandwich between Mission of Burma and Public Enemy, one couldn't but feel like the audience was a massive third wheel. Amongst Barlow's endless stage banter included an impromptu, hilariously off-key rendition of Tom Petty's "The Waiting" and changes in equipment that derailed any momentum the show would have had. Still, tracks like "Fantastic Disaster" showed what Sebadoh were capable of when they held our attention.
Public Enemy
Finally, the performance of the night, if not the entire festival. After a brief, somewhat bizarre, opening set from PE's legendary DJ Duo The Bomb Squad consisting of dub-reggae beats (the utter opposite of their uptempo work which help make It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back a legendary and important work), PE clumsily took the stage. As you've no doubt read already, Flavor Flav was late to the performance. And yet, he still could be heard coming from the speakers. And you know what that means. Flavor Flav is a spectre haunting the powers of old music, and his new sitcom, Under One Roof, is his manifesto.
Except not. One of the bizarre low-lights out of an otherwise stellar and incendiary performance, Flavor Flav plugged his sitcom to an audience of materialistically anti-materialistic hipsters. Needless to say, Flav responded with a tirade that made me think about what would happen if Tracy Morgan's character from 30 Rock had been conceived as an aging rapper. "You call your wife 'Boo', you don't boo me." Later on, Flav brought out his godson, who looked absolutely thriillllleed (He hates it when Uncle Chuck talks about how the revolution will not be televised!). This despite the fact that Flavor Flav displayed no sense of self-awareness at all while playing the anti-television scold on "She Watch Channel Zero!". Flav blind to his own sad irony, Baby". Flav blind.
And yet, Public Enemy's performance was so incredible, despite flaws like that, and the constant passive-aggression insistence that they didn't lyp-synch (medoths think Flav protest too much, especially on "Show 'Em What You Got"), that I wanted to take it out behind a middle school and get it pregnant. 20 years after their creation, in a political climate that sees one branch of government mindlessly help another branch to essentially become a Monarchy (but hey, enjoy those last six, Dub), Public Enemy's furious brand of leftist militant anthems for the intelligently angry were more relevant than ever. While "Bring The Noise" stumbled a bit, and the choreographed intro to "Don't Believe The Hype" was awkwardly choreographed, Chuck D and Company (DJ Lord, Flav, D, and a guitar-bass-drums back-up band), "Caught, Can We Get A Witness", "Cold Lampin' With Flava" (the fascinating back-story behind the track was another Saturday highlight), and "Rebel Without A Pause" were little blasts of revolutionary party anthems that enlightened you and made you get down with your bad self. The booming-bass, uptempo siren-laded songs were a cathartic release in the taut anxiety of the Bush-era. After the last Millions song was performed, PE launched into a multitude of past hits, including well-known hits like "911 is a Joke" and "Can't Truss It", that continued to send the gala of radicalism well past the intended curfew. After deftly slipping a surprisingly strong new song, the funk-and-soul fusion of "Harder Than You Think", the group closed out on "Fight The Power". I'll just say this: to hear the the "Elvis was a hero to most/but he never meant shit to me" verse live and uncensored was, after an entire evening of off-the-hook hip-hop, the best part of the evening was really saying something. It said, "Even if its messenger looked foolish at times, the message itself will always matter most". Just as long as its not delivered on a sitcom.
