Young Jeezy Live at the Blender Theatre

Posted at 2:21 PM, August 27, 2008

Young Jeezy
Blender Theater
Tuesday, August 26

"When you walk outside, don't see the stars" said Young Jeezy last night, in full motivational-speaker mode: "Just know the sky's the limit." It occurs, vaguely, that next week's The Recession, rather than an up-to-the-minute diagnosis of societal ills and the betrayal of America's working class, may in fact be another savvy marketing plan from a guy who’s looking to trade up on his demographic. Having already pitched the streets, Jeezy's headed straight for the comparatively easy prey of the paranoid, twitching, middle-management boardroom. "You make it here," he said, about halfway through, channeling his New York surroundings, "You can make it anywhere." Somewhere, rap's actual Sinatra—conspicuously absent from the Blender Theatre stage, even as Jeezy plaintively cranked his verse from "Put On"'s remix—was shaking his head. Kanye—another no-show, although the audience did his part on "Put On" for him (louder, it should be noted, than anything the crowd deigned to do for the ostensible man of the evening)—may well have been with him.

Fabolous, on the tear of his life right now, emerged and did "Breathe"—pandemonium, basically, pandemonium which was then clubbed into submission by Lil' Kim and Maino going back to back right after him. Jeezy, who has hits for days ("Ain't nothing one hit wonder about me!") survives mostly on charisma live: "You don't see Young at awards shows, there's a reason for that—I'm not lame enough." True enough, but how many times past "Go Crazy" can horns blare theatrically and synths swell dramatically before a crowd gets worn out? Presumably even his hype man (who had the unenviable task of catching the lit blunt Jeezy kept tossing him, sometimes from very far away) was happy when the end came. After all, we all had to get home to catch Hillary defer her dreams, which perhaps explained the confusing clarification that came with The Recession's "My President is Black:" "It’s Tupac, and then my man Barack Obama." Uh, what?

No Context: Orchestral Black Sabbath (Backwards) at Passerby

Posted by Zach Baron at 3:30 PM, February 14, 2008

No Context

“From Beyond”
GBE@Passerby
Wednesday, February 13

On YouTube there is a vast and growing sub-category of videos that dwell on the total destruction of the earth by mankind, videos that start with a tranquil shot of the earth from outer space. The segue to apocalypse is handled differently by different auteurs, but the elements of the deck remain pretty constant: Mushroom cloud; man walking on the moon; one missile colliding with another missile in midair; mushroom cloud; reprise. These clips unfurl with uniformly grim soundtracks, and the number-one soundtrack pick for “war its such a brutal planet”- and “fuck planet earth”-type montages that abound in the 18-or-older backrooms of the Broadcast Yourself empire turns out to be, over and over again, Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void.” The reasons for this choice are self-evident. Sabbath's proto-environmentalist, nuclear-winter anxiety dream imagines the population of planet Earth riding rockets to safety and the sun, a scenario that seems will soon come to pass and is also comparatively easy to animate. Other takes on “Into the Void” have included doom metal and ecoterrorism, but Sabbath's never really been touched in terms of out and out depressive clarity, and at this point they probably never will be.

Forwards, “Into the Void” sounds a bit like a factory collapsing, the metallic clank of the bassline grating off the most merciless Iommi-downstrokes in a catalogue consists of nothing but. Backwards, it turns out, “Into the Void” sounds. . . uplifting. I refer here to “From Beyond,” the Lucas and Jason Ajemian art piece/conservatory gag in which “Into the Void” is transcribed backwards and arranged for classical orchestra. “From Beyond” is an Boston Pops concept that in execution—say, at GBE@Passerby, where it was performed three times in a row last night—might be the best performance I’ve seen this year.

“From Beyond” has a bit of corollary in themusic-not-music American Idol slums of rock simulacra—someone might suggest that’s why it’s proving to be such effective gallery fodder—but it’s also an undeniably exciting piece of music, jagged and squawky but with a straight line running right through it. Predictably, the performance has already been gobbled up by the more experimental wing of the museum world: it debuted at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and will have its reprise this summer in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Of two brothers, Lucas Ajemian, who handles the yzzO vocals, is the artworld connect. Jason, who did the arranging, is a wild-eyed music-school graduate in a trapper hat and a suit two sizes too big, and he conducts standing on a paint bucket.

The orchestra ran small at Passerby, at about thirteen pieces, thirteen conservatory types cribbing off sheet music and grimacing at the fast parts. The audience grimaced too. Swing, that quality that separates us from the animals, is mercilessly stamped-out going the right way through "Into the Void" but returns when the piece is played backwards. Figures, if you think about how all the movement in a Sabbath song, when turned around, inverts from down to up.

"He's a conservatory master," whispered a friend, admiring Ajemian as he rode the bucket. But afterwards, Jason told a different story: "This is the first thing I've conducted in my life."

Live: Vampire Weekend at the Bowery Ballroom

Posted by Jesse Jarnow at 10:42 AM, January 30, 2008

CREDIT

Vampire Weekend
Bowery Ballroom
Tuesday, January 29

Way #373 to feel old: when opening band Beat the Devil keeps cracking jokes about the crowd being jailbait, then wish their drummer a happy 22nd birthday. They're still not wrong. The sense of all-inclusive occasion surrounding Vampire Weekend's January 29th album release party at the Bowery Ballroom is underscored when the houselights dim part-way and I am nudged aside by a camera dude, who bares his digicam above the crowd like a stoic human tripod. There are at least three others like him in the stage's wings and in the balcony (plus auxiliary mixing technicians next to the soundboard).

The sold-out show, the first of two, is something of a send-off for the happily collegiate quartet. That, or a Viking funeral. The hype having done its job—a label (XL), an album (Vampire Weekend), and a piece in the New York Times Sunday Styles section all secured—it is time for Vampire Weekend to get to the business of being a band. Their mothers are in attendance. By the time they make it to the stage, the camera dude's shoulders are slumping slightly, and he holds his gear at shoulder-level.

On the night's second song, "I Stand Corrected," Vampire Weekend shows their hand. Plenty has been made of the group's Graceland/Afro-pop/yadda-yadda influences—which are not insignificant—but the band Vampire Weekend perhaps most resembles is another outfit from Manhattan's Upper West Side: the Strokes. Besides a common vocabulary made of sturdy guitar stabs and laconic sexual negotiations, the two quartets share a privileged swagger. Though the Vampires remain more polite musically and conceptually—indeed, guitarist/singer Ezra Koenig takes to the stage in a purple cardigan that appears embroidered with eagles—their stance is actually far more radical than the Strokes' age-old punk slumming.

It is not so much that Vampire Weekend frequently sing about being rich as they make music that channels the warmth and security that goes along with it. Who doesn't like comfort? Their references to African guitar pop, instantly obvious in the gallop of the show-opening "Mansard Roof," are not so much a channeling of third world elegance as a first world soundtrack to weekends in the Hamptons drinking white wine. "As a young girl, Louis Vuitton," Koenig sings on "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," the third tune of the 13-song set, his natural pronunciation of "Vuitton" as telling as the contrasts of its title. The between-verse synth-harpsichord breaks by keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij that recall Wes Anderson soundtracks don't hurt either.

Admittedly, it can be a fun fantasy to sink into, especially for a crowd whose memories of the '80s are woozy at best, if they literally exist at all. But it is also a little troublesome, at least if there any strands of egalitarianism left in indie rock. After all, how entitled does one have to be sing about being bored at Cape Cod? Vampire Weekend doesn't address the question, but sing about it anyway, on "Wolcott," the encore's final song—and perhaps their very best hook—which is received with apeshit pogoing. "In the afternoon, you're out on the stolen grass, and I'm sleeping on the balcony after class," Koenig sings earlier on "Campus," a milder statement of the concept, and as pleasant a conception of happiness as any.

But, if it doesn't make one want to saw his own arm off with a copy of Capeman, it can all be quite charming. At the Bowery, Koenig bops like a Fab while drummer Chris Tomson and bassist Chris Baio lean into grooves grown more from the naiveté necessary to channel Afro-pop than from the Afro-pop itself. They feel surprisingly durable, as do Koenig's melodies, which can linger for weeks, like a guiltily snacked-upon bag of chocolate chips. Vampire Weekend's recordings suggest a certain preciousness that, like the Shins, might only translate into a thin-sounding stage act. Live, Vampire Weekend is another beast entirely. Still precious, the songs hold up, the kids dig 'em, and it all only adds to a gnawing suspicion that they may, in fact, be real. Shit.

CREDIT

Live: Laura Marling + Lucinda Black Bear at Union Hall

Posted by Michael D. Ayers at 2:00 PM, January 22, 2008

Laura Marling: like watching a young woman bare her soul for her cat

Live: Laura Marling + Lucinda Black Bear
Union Hall
Friday January 18

Last week, Laura Marling played four shows. As far as young, possibly sappy, possibly brilliant, singer-songwriters go, the 17-year-old from Reading, UK is possibly one of the best to come through these parts in a long time. She’s awkward, like your little sister was when she was going through puberty. You look at her, and think she’s still so innocent, still so naïve, sitting there in her red Mickey Mouse sweatshirt with stringy blonde hair pulled back. She could be studying Spanish because there’s a big test tomorrow. Or bitching about her parents’ lame rules.

Alas, it’s none of that. Well, it’s a lot of those thoughts running through my head, because her youthful looks probably remind me of my own fleeting youth, as well as the rest of the NPR contributors in the audience. But Marling manages to lure you in because she never focuses on you, or anyone in the audience. She just stares downward at the floor, looking a bit cross-eyed, as she strums—while her male partner, a nice enough seeming lad, plays along, adding some soft drum rhythms and backing guitars.

Her voice sounds like Beth Orton’s—if that’s your thing, you’d love Marling. Her songs are sparse and simplistic the way Orton’s early material was, but Marling’s a bit darker. Her tune “Night Terror” describes protecting her boyfriend from those who are haunting her lover; so much so, she’s willing to put up a fight. Yet she feels a bit more disturbed in a Nick Drake way; a bit more soul-baring than I recall Orton’s Trailer Park-era ever being. She took a few crowd jabs in stride when she mentioned she’d be “checking out Williamsburg” the following day, which provided a rare smile and acknowledgment that there were people watching her. But mostly watching Marling feels like you’re spying on some young woman who's baring her soul for her cat.

Headlining the evening was Lucinda Black Bear, a rock-noir outfit headed by C.Gibbs (a/k/a Christian Gibbs). Gibbs is neither awkward, nor young; in fact, he’s extremely confident in commanding this five piece he’s recently assembled, who're bolstered by a cello and a violin. Gibbs has been around the game awhile; he flirted with a major label release in 1999, and has subsequently released two records this decade. He’s received accolades over the years from high end places such as the New York Times and NPR, but seemingly has failed to catch on with those most likely be his fans—those who appreciate Okkervil River or Magnolia Electric Company / Songs: Ohia.

Unlike Marling, Lucinda Black Bear sing songs about fighting bears. Well, just one song, really, involves a throwdown: “Fought The Bear” is a large sounding rocker, a full-on assault of Gibbs crowing and crescendo’ing about a quick brush with death, something that fits his band's morose vibe. He passionately convinces us that this bear fight (with his bare hands) really happened, something that as we get older, we don’t even consider possible. There was a time, decades ago, that fighting bears seemed like a real possibility as did playing professional sports. Another one of the staples in Lucinda Black Bear’s catalog is “Kites,” a slow, twangy ballad that highlights Gibb’s abstract storytelling. It’s not a carefree kite flying song (although flying kites, is in fact, referenced) but instead comes off a bit bitter, a bit jaded, and dejected, as Gibbs describes coming to terms with losing a friend. Gibbs himself puts this into his performances, a downsized version of himself that the jaded and the heartbroken can appreciate—those with imagination, yet who were never rewarded for that quality.

Lucinda Black Bear might be just getting off the ground, and Gibbs has assembled a talented backing band. But his song arrangements (like on the album) would even lend themselves to a larger ensemble, maybe a piano here and there, and a banjo or mandolin would even sound appropriate—but for Union Hall’s tiny stage, a five piece was enough for the moment.

Photos: Kate Nash at Bowery Ballroom, 1.9.08

Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:06 AM, January 10, 2008

Kate Nash; photo by Rebecca Smeyne

Kate Nash
and Salt & Samovar
Bowery Ballroom
January 9, 2008
photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Status Ain't Hood on Kate Nash's show last night.

Salt & Samovar; photo by Rebecca Smeyne

More photos after the jump.

Previously

Fuck a Blog: Jeffrey Lewis

Posted by Rob Harvilla at 3:25 PM, January 8, 2008

Jeffrey Lewis
Sidewalk Cafe
Thursday, January 3

Walked to this straight from Juno. Bleargh. Tolerance for guileless, sing-song lobotomy-pop thus at a low tide indeed, and yet here I find Mr. Lewis, a Downtown cohort of the Moldy Peaches/Kimya Dawson nexus, dreamily clutching his stickered-up guitar beneath a banner declaring this the “Home of Antifolk.” What the “anti” means in 2008 is up for debate, or derision, if you’re feeling crabby, which I suppose I briefly was.

“Anti-Virtual Lower East Side,” it seems fair to say. The tension between the new and old (and virtual) versions of Jeffrey’s home base seems to weigh heavily on him, or at least as heavily as anything weighs on him, which is to say not heavily at all. Jeffrey is very, very sedate. His deadpan delivery, a wide-eyed valedictorian monotone, has plenty of nerd-rock precedent—TMBG’s John Linnell, or the Dead Milkmen at their slackest—but with fingerpaint bursts of the childlike wonder that’s set the Juno soundtrack’s star disquietingly aflame. Thing is, from the onset, Jeffrey makes that style seem tremendously appealing, both right here at the Sidewalk and back there at the theater.

It’s the a capella song about Ramen that did it, or did it first. With a wobbly, pinched-nose oration, he describes the history of the starving artist’s favorite meal, pinpoints his favorite flavor, and dreams of owning a popular art gallery/restaurant that doesn’t serve it. Most of Jeffrey’s shy, embarrassed between-song banter has a half-poem, half-rap, all-reluctance lilt, and playing guitar doesn’t really change that. His simple, rickety chord changes are more like nervous tics, something to do with his hands, like a guy on a first date distractedly building a pyramid of sugar packets in a diner booth. But it feels more controlled than usual, less an I’m-Still-Five-Years-Old affectation and more of a genuine style. His lyrics mix pawnshop zen koans (“I always kind of like to be surprised/I don’t want to know what happens when I die”) with corny rhyming exercises (“eating Tofutti Cuties with Fela Kuti”) with, when delivered in his shell-shocked Steven Wright mumble, what passes for actual jokes (“You say it’s dog-eat-dog/But dogs don’t eat dogs”).

Then, the climax. “I have a new pedal,” Jeffrey declares. “I got it as a gift. Let’s plug it in and see what it does.” He announces that it’s a Hi Band Flanger, and then he starts playing with it. What it does, evidently, is make eerie birdlike sounds, which we then listen to for roughly five minutes or so, Jeffrey crouched down to manipulate the knobs. (From the bar in the next room—from whence we can catch glimpses of the Orange Bowl on TV and occasionally hear a couple drunk dudes singing along with the stereo on, say, Erasure’s “A Little Respect”—a guy walks in to investigate, stares at Jeffrey’s hunched figure for a few seconds, shakes his head, and walks back to the bar.) When satisfied with his birdlike sounds, Jeffrey gives us the technical specs: MANUAL knob all the way down, DEPTH all the way up, RATE down, and RES just most of the way up. We appreciate this update. He turns it off. We applaud. He then produces a handheld tape recorder, with which he’d been recording everything. He rewinds it, mics it up, hits play, and then sings his next song (featuring “goons with harpoons waiting in adjacent rooms”) with the tape as accompaniment. The song ends, and we applaud live simultaneously with the applause on the tape. I find this all inexplicably profound.

Later this month Jeffrey releases his fourth Rough Trade album, 12 Crass Songs, which is, indeed, a dozen Crass covers, streaming “I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just a Trick” or “Do They Owe Us a Living” (yes) or “Punk Is Dead” (also yes) through a gauzy, full-band prog-folk daze that might remind you of that Why? dude. It’s winsome, if a little bizarre. But Jeffrey’s meant for the stage, rhapsodizing Ramen, testing out his new gear, selling his comic books, and evoking a dog-doesn’t-eat-dog L.E.S. that might not even exist anymore, even online. This will only make you appreciate him more. I don’t see what anyone sees in anyone else.

Jeffrey Lewis plays Joe’s Pub Thursday, January 10, joespub.com. The CD release for 12 Crass Songs takes place at the Mercury Lounge on Wednesday, January 30. Tickets available here.

Things We Forgot To Tell You in 2008: Never Heard of Zeppelin

Posted by Camille Dodero at 5:44 PM, December 14, 2007

Never Heard of Zeppelin
Lucky Cheng's
Monday, January 22, 2007
photos by Cami D

Well, we told you a little about Never Heard of Zeppelin here:

"Alex Billig now lives in Williamsburg and runs around screaming as the one-man shrill electro-noise creature Never Heard of Zeppelin. He used to intern at CMJ, he dreams of a place with no alarm clocks, and he's never heard of a very famous band."

But neglected to include these shirtless, pantless photos. . .

No Context: Vincent Gallo's RRIICCEE Live at the Green Room

Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:15 AM, December 10, 2007

A Study of RRIICCEE at Eyedrum in Atlanta, Georgia by getzsch

No Context by Zach Baron

RRIICCEE
Green Room
December 7

The definition of irrational public behavior is probably something along the exact lines of attending a Friday night musical performance at the Green Room on Bleecker Street and expecting to see the band’s guitarist get a blowjob onstage, but people usually think of Vincent Gallo as being the irrational one. Similarly, you could call the fact that he spent most of his band’s set on his knees an apt reversal, but it’s not like he’s the first rock musician to adopt the pose.

Anyway I remember liking Gallo’s last record for Warp, Recordings of Music for Film, and I also remember liking Hole, and so the potential for eight inches was probably only the third or fourth reason I went to see RRIICCEE, Gallo’s new band with Hole’s Eric Erlandson.

Still, Gallo being a narcissistic guy is the gist of the evening. There were a couple of merch guys selling “one of a kind found articles” (i.e. lost-and-found street garments) “hand silkscreened by RRIICCEE” for 50 dollars—shades of Vincent Gallo's $3,000 Childhood Hopalong Cassidy Bedspread, available online accompanied by a letter of authenticity, or more infamously, the $50,000-$1,000,000 personal services offered to any “naturally born” female. As far as the actual noise goes, RRIICCEE’s music trends somewhere between a trebly Slint with no real basslines and an inferior drummer and a less lush MONO or Explosions in the Sky, punctured by a set-closing Gallo falsetto. This mattered to the genuine spectacle insofar as there wasn’t much spectacle to be had, so at some point listening was inevitable.

But what you didn’t end up hearing at the Green Room was more suggestive: the visible dissonance of forcing a veteran arena man like Erlandson to play minimal art-rock instead of big melodic chords, or Gallo’s repeated pleas to an already dazed Rebecca Casabian on keyboards to play “Slower!” She resembled any number of put upon and be-lipsticked Mark E. Smith keyboardists, and like Mark E., Gallo has burned through any number of musical collaborators prior to RRIICCEE: Sean Lennon, Jean Michel Basquiat, Lucas Haas, etc. Which is no surprise for someone who’s been trying to talk himself into suspecting or outright hating Jews, gays, African-Americans, and liberals for the last decade or longer. Quoted in this paper’s Brown Bunny review was this paradigmatic Gallo comment on collaboration: “The question is not how did I do it all myself: It's, How did I put up with the incompetence of the people I had to work with?” (Also contained within this same review is the world’s best summary of the Brown Bunny’s plot using the fewest words, e.g. “The film finds Gallo driving alone for 100 minutes, then forcing a torturous blowjob on Chloë Sevigny.”)

So Gallo gives good quotes, although I didn’t ask him for any. His shows are more about self-presentation and Rene Ricard-esque unpredictability in action than how well he plays the guitar, and though I thought his band was alright I don’t think many people would listen if not for celebrity diorama that RRIICCEE cuts onstage. Once it became clear nothing beyond effects pedals would be twisted, the bathroom trips got frequent, and rather than ducking when moving past the stage on their way there, people tended to slow down and gawk, as if they were at an aquarium and the band behind glass. It’s tempting to further the metaphor and note that the downtown New York of which Gallo is an undisputed graduate is like this too now, but for all I know Sonic Youth played the same underwhelming set in ’81.

Hugs and Kisses #22: Farewell to Electrelane

Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:00 AM, December 4, 2007

A few months ago, Brighton four-piece Electrelane went on "indefinite hiatus." We sniffled. Plan B publisher/SOC weekly columnist Everett True just caught the band's final hometown send-off. He sniffled. E-mail your sniffles to Everett at everett@planbmag.com

Hugs And Kisses The Continued Outbursts of Everett True

THIS WEEK: Farewell to Electrelane

“Do you think people will be in tears by the end?” asked my wife where we were stood, halfway back at the Brighton Pavilion.

Her timing was unfortunate. Verity Susman had just finished performing a totally stunning version of recent single “To The East” with the band she founded back in 1998 with drummer Emma Gaze, the defiantly individual Electrelane – and I was choking back emotion. Her voice sounded so powerful, magnetic – yearning, caught up in the loneliness of imminent separation, throwing out high-pitched notes seemingly unknowing amid the motorik beat, driven organ and resolute guitar.

My mind was flashing back fitfully: wandering sober and suited in the aftermath of 9/11 through Brighton car parks accompanied by four serene female musicians (Electrelane), merry and sea-swept near the carousel on Brighton seafront, utterly charmed by bassist Ros Murray’s previous band, the Marine Girls-referencing Lesbo Pig, arguments caused by guitarist Mia Clarke about music and friendship, the deep dark days upon being informed of my dad’s imminent death and recording several spoken word pieces influenced by same, soundtracked by Susman’s tumbling, wastrel piano (and later, when he died: one of those songs played as his body departed the crematorium), radio shows in tandem with Gaze (and also a first tentative entry back into the live arena)…the fact that Electrelane chanced across my vision (late 2001) the same time photographer Steve Gullick first mooted the idea of the magazine that would become Careless Talk Costs Lives to me – and have now called a halt to their music (“an indefinite hiatus”) just as Plan B enters the most problematic period of its existence…the fact that during the entire period of these two magazines’ existence they supplied a constant to my life’s changing tapestry (and vice versa)…

Why would you give up a name that you’ve struggled so hard to have people recognise? Is pride that important? (Don’t answer. I know the answer.)

And I thought of the previous time I saw Electrelane – just a few short months ago, warming up for what has turned out to be their final tour, at Brighton’s intimate Westhill Community Centre: and there I was driven to feelings of near hatred for Clarke – the way she was playing Marnie Stern-influenced shredding guitar lines that seemed at odds with Electrelane’s subtle pulse, for the way she put me in mind of all those Seventies rock bands where the guitarist existed separate to the songs, in another realm altogether…but tonight, she (no less passionate, no less driven) gelled so much better: her guitar sawed across the top of the amplifier entirely in keeping with the violet mood of the evening. I mean, one doesn’t do subtle for one’s final show, does one?

But of course, Electrelane did. No shouts, no calls. Tour support Anni Rossi came on to add violin to “The Greater Times”, an unheard-of two encores were played, culminating in a splendidly frantic version of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire”, song choices were mostly split between debut album, 2001’s Rock It To The Moon and this year’s swansong No Shouts, No Calls with pretty much all the singles (“This Deed”, On Parade”, “Film Music”, “Two For Joy”) in between, giving Clarke and Susman plenty of opportunity to indulge their “restrained rocker” fantasies one last time. And typically, the newest member (Murray) took stage centre.

The band came back on after the second encore for the briefest of bows, and to pass a bottle of champagne to fans – and that was it.

Almost imperceptibly, life has become greyer this morning.

Hugs And Kisses Top 5
Everett True’s five favourite Electrelane songs (in no particular order)

1. “The Valleys” (from The Power Out, 2004). As played during countless DJ stints to empty floors and cracked frames – full Welsh choral accompaniment, and all.

2. “On Parade” (from The Power Out, 2004). Magnificently skewed, with a killer guitar line and – wait, is that Verity singing? Whoa. Why didn’t she do that before? To this day, I swear she’s singing, “I want to wear your underwear” in the chorus.

3. “I Want To Be The President” (2003 single). Neu! has rarely sounded as gorgeous as this. Watch your volume control in the middle!

4. “Gone Darker” (from Axes, 2005). This is the centrepiece of their [finest] album, a seven-minute sprawling epic that serves as both travelogue and adventure. From the distant boat sounds and hubbub at the song’s start, through Susman’s squealing saxophone and Mia Clarke’s menacing guitar, the song builds and builds to a crescendo of wordless movement and recrimination, until disintegrating in a chilling denouement. It’s a storming moment. (OK, I quoted from my own review.)

5. “Film Music” (from Rock It To The Moon, 2001)/“I’m On Fire” (B-side of “On Parade,” 2004) Where it all began – and where it all ended.

Live: Ween at Terminal 5

Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:15 AM, December 3, 2007

photo by Johnny Leather

Text by Michael D. Ayers

Ween
Terminal 5
Friday, November 30

On your knees, you big booty bitch, start sucking. Ween fans love this line.

They love a lot of lines that they’ll shout out as often as Dean and Gene will sing em, but this one in particular seems to summarize what a Ween concert is about. Not a Ween album; as Rob describes here, Ween albums are complicated, ripe with parody at times, but sweet and sentimental at others. Oxymoronic, both in lyric and genre forms, but still something of value to the artists. But maybe one of the key elements within a Ween album for me is that I’ve tended to listen to them when alone.

So when you see a guy holding his girlfriend during “Piss Up A Rope,” a smile on his face as he repeats the aforementioned line, there is something utterly confusing, or sad, or possibly scary about this. Ween is wholeheartedly a dude’s band and they, Ween, knows this. And somehow, their shows transform into spaces unlike any other in rock: one’s filled with mostly sophomoric excuses to revert back to seventh grade locker room behavior. Jokes about poo become relevant and fresh; dissing and degrading chicks behind their backs is more than acceptable, and jubilantly shouting “AIDS!”— which are only one of two lyrics in “The HIV Song”—is not by all means weird. (The other lyric being “HIV” if you haven’t heard this.)

So I’m standing there, wondering, is this a bad thing? People are having a great time; they’re invested in spending their Friday night with 3500 other people, all forgetting about whatever it is they have going on in real life. I guess I can see that it’s okay to let one’s hair down every now and then and “act your shoe size and not your age” (I’m quoting my seventh grade gym teacher here). I mean after all, “Waving My Dick In The Wind” isn’t meant to be a plead for action; it’s a love song about missing someone.

So to get down to the music, Ween was touring to support their recent La Cucaracha, but to my disappointment, they only played three songs off it. The swanky, sleazy “Your Party,” in which Gene Ween sung as elegantly as possible; he swayed his hips back and forth at time, while trying to conceal a grin that suggested this cheese was pretty funny to him. The instrumental “Fiesta” showed up in the encore, and the other song that made it in was the bizarre, and downright creepy “Object.” Had the crowd sung the lyrics to this one in unison, of which Gene describes
you as being a "piece of meat," who presumably is killed and discarded, except for your sweater that "they found," I would have been full on scared. But they didn’t. I guess there are lines you don’t cross; either that, or the song is just too new in the Ween catalog.

Older tunes such as “Reggaejunkiejew,” the heavy guitar thrashing of “You Fucked Up,” and the jammed out, proggy “I’ll Be Your Johnny On The Spot” were well received (by me) but I preferred the slower, sometimes spacey ballads that if you’re a Ween veteran, you’re probably sick of hearing by now. No one cared too much about the distorted “Zoloft." And “Baby Bitch” was as tender as they claim they can be, despite another crowd pleasing shout together line towards the end that goes, “Fuck you, you stinkin’ ass ho.” I like to think that I’ve made amends with the baby bitches of my past, so yet again, if you’re not expecting it, it’s weird to hear people shout this all at once.

At this point, it’s probably even silly to overanalyze a Ween show. I came to realize, they’re not a band for the casual fan like me. I’ve listened to the albums enough to recognize most songs, and enjoy most songs, but in concert it feels like too much of an inside joke for me to identify with. That's fine. After all, this is a band with a song called “Poop Ship Destroyer.”

No Context: Mountain Goats at NYU

Posted by Camille Dodero at 10:34 AM, December 3, 2007

No Context

by Zach Baron

The Mountain Goats
NYU Kimmel Center
November 29, 2007

Like so many of the homer fans John Darnielle now makes fun of from stages all across the United States, I’ll cop to an almost pathological aversion to anything made post-4AD, and to an equally Pavlovian fanboy response towards everything pre-. Darnielle knows this phenomenon, among other reasons because he’s as obsessive about records as the next guy chasing Taboo VI ‘cross eBay. Before one song last night, the 4:01-clocking “Tallahassee,” from Tallahassee, the record that marks the dividing line, he joked: “4:01! In the old days that was like 7 songs…”

Anyway this gets embarrassing, as far as public behavior goes. Me, mid-show, post-2002 composition: furious; disgustedly staring at the ground. Me, mid-show, pre-2002 composition: ecstatic; hopping. Generally I am the least stalker-like fan a band will ever obtain but there is the notable exception of the Mountain Goats, about which I develop theories.

One such theory, regarding audience affection, from an earlier draft of this very piece: “…Granted, this particular concert took place at NYU, but I’ve always fretted about the adoration Darnielle’s received in the 4AD era, which in regards to its character is less frantic and pushy and more messianic, which has always led me to worry about the effect being hailed as god might have on a man whose ideal rock show is the one put on by Heart on their Dreamboat Annie tour, etc etc…”

Look, who could argue that he doesn’t deserve it—even deserves the pair of girls who were right in front of me last night, wearing peasant blouses, flared jeans, and open mouths, who professed adoration for Peter Hughes—“I like this guy, whoever he is!” Characters who may well have been torn to pieces by a Mountain Goats crowd, circa ’97.

Again, call my knee-jerk what it is, which is involuntary. In the year that I discovered file-sharing and downloaded 40 different live Mountain Goats bootlegs, occupying my laptop’s tiny hard drive to the detriment of Word documents, pornography, other music, and emails more than three days old, the live-set refrain I inflicted on myself at the rough repeated frequency suggested by home hypnotism tapes was: “As you all know, I don’t write songs about myself.”

Famously this changed. Tallahassee, Darnielle’s trial run for 4AD, was a record about the Mountain Goats’ long-running, long-suffering Alpha couple, vodka-swilling and living near the Florida-Alabama border in decaying house with no children and no future; We Shall All Be Healed and Come, Come to the Sunset Tree and Get Lonely instead introduced a new character, one who’d never once graced any of the 500-odd songs the Mountain Goats had already written, whose name was John Darnielle.

Previously, avoiding the personal had always seemed a way of subtracting the confessional and bathetic stuff from the singer-songwriter paradigm. Writing about other people freed Darnielle up to act out, to identify, and for us to act out, and identify, and there you had it, the two-way street that gave birth to guys like myself who would later basically spit at the floor when Darnielle took a bigger piece of the action for himself.

‘Nuff said though; the new one, due next year, is called Heretic Pride, which is probably all the summary re: Darnielle’s POV necessary. The song “Heretic Pride,” which he previewed last night, is a banger – “old-school jams” is how he described the new record; fanboys take note – and hearing it was only one of many moments that exposed the whole split in the band’s catalogue for what it is—notional not actual.

Funny thing was, NYU was more Mountain Goats double-major fantasy-nerd than it was indie-citizen, slick-orchestrated Mountain Goats. Off tour, Darnielle and Hughes were in town for a one-shot, off-brand show: under-rehearsed, request-ready, off-the-cuff. Darnielle broke strings (“Old days, I used to break a string ever three songs”), did interpolations (from “Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”: “…and the top three contenders, after weeks of debate, were Satan’s Fingers, and the HOLD STEADY, and the Hospital Bombers…”), and played ancient songs: “Love Cuts the Strings,” “Orange Ball of Hate, “Alpha Incipiens,” etc.

But it was “Dance Music,” from the ostensibly loathsome Sunset Tree, that got me worst, as the two coeds just in front of me began to first suggestively bang hips before in fact banging hips and then banging asses and then full-on grinding, I kid you not. They went to the floor. They came back up. Everyone shouted “I DON’T WANT TO DIE ALONE” and for a second we were all the same fan.

Live: Big Business, Panthers at the Knitting Factory, 06.20.07

Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:16 AM, June 20, 2007

Panthers, not at the Knitting Factory; photo by Sidney Lo

Big Business + Panthers
Knitting Factory
June 19

by Zach Baron

There’ll be pictures of this somewhere, but so what: Imagine a man, mid six-feet, early thirties, bulky everywhere, cougar glaring off his shirt, untamed beard and, above his ears, twin braided pigtails, a pair of sideburns coming alive. Big bass, bigger amplifiers: you’re looking at Big Business’s Jared Warren, who in person resembles nothing so much as an inhabitant of one of his own songs, a kind of force of nature.

Big news of the night, though, belonged to Panthers: regular drummer Jeff Salane was conspicuously absent; Jay Green, their singer, dedicated a song to him. Salane just had his first child—dunno if his absence signaled paternity leave or something more permanent, but congratulations are due either way, no?

Last fall, Panthers killed at CMJ—see here—but the MC5-flavored, riff-riddled energy they’ve finally tracked down took off in low-gear last night. Blame the sound: no guitars whatsoever, guitars being one of the bigger pleasures of Panthers’ pretty fucking good The Trick of a few months back. The soundman, cranking the low end beyond all reasonable justification, was obviously holding out for the subsonic absurdity that scheduled to come on next.

“STAMPEDE!” Here Come the Waterworks’ venue-wrecking anthem “Hands Up” was in fine form: no sooner did Warren call out the charge than a sucking vortex broke out on the Knit’s floor, an old-fashioned melee stalked by the kind of oversized men you don’t often see in an undernourished city like New York. The battle was not for the small or sober. “Don’t throw your drinks,” said Warren. “They belong in your mouth—they taste better that way.” The volume was Merzbow-calibrated absurd: when frequencies are that persuasive, even clothing becomes a kind of instrument, vibrating along in sympathy. Add the nauseating cloud of weed-smoke and an underpowered smoke machine and the scene could’ve been lifted out of Apocalypse Now.

Mythic is what this band is—impossibly proficient, statuesque, and merciless. Coady Willis, batting glove-d up, headset attired, body a blur; Warren, looming, back lit—even the guitarist they brought along, an undersized guy introduced as Toshi, bulked up by virtue of the size of the sound behind him. The lesson, for those willing to take it, was clear: listening to Big Business makes you a bigger man. Or something. Women, clearly still women at the end of the set, cheered just as madly, but though they left the amps on, the band was not to return.

Photos: Best Fwends, Team Robespierre at Silent Barn, 05.25.07

Posted by Camille Dodero at 2:01 PM, May 25, 2007

BEST FWENDS

TEAM ROBESPIERRE

Rad photos by Rebecca Smeyne

AND TONIGHT, THEY'RE BOTH BACK. . .

Lady Sov Melts Down at Studio B?

Posted by Camille Dodero at 10:36 AM, May 21, 2007

Credit Flickr user lonnehendrix; more photos there

Last Friday, Lady Sovereign was booked for a late-night "mini-set" at Studio B's weekly FUN dance party, the same night she opened for Gwen Stefani in Jersey. This here sucker actually bought a ticket for it, but then ended up ditching the show when I'd decided the biggest midget in the game would never turn up. Apparently, she did. As alleged musical Midas and coke-nose-illustrator Perez Hilton posted over the weekend:

Sov was scheduled to play a 2 A.M. set at Studio B in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but she rolled in super late and didn't take to the stage until around 3:30 A.M.

After taking the stage tardy, she then started complaining that the crowd was too small and she complained that she was only playing the show because she was "poor" and "about to get evicted from her apartment," sources tell us . . .

Adds another source, "When the music finished, she complained about her poverty again, said she hated America, was depressed, showed the audience her arm which bore razor cuts (v. Courtney Love of her), and eventually went to the back of the stage and began crying as a body guard tried to calm her down and encourage her to finish her set, which was only slated to be 3 songs!"

She then was like "Fuck this, I don't care if I don't get paid" and walked off after a quick talk with her DJ.

Not that Perez is to be trusted, but Rock Star Diary also stuck around and posted a report about the fiasco here. Plus, there're three other anecdotal reports here, here, and here. Never mind that two sets of Flickr photos from that night are both tagged "breakdown." Anyone else document her freak out?

Live: They Might Be Giants at Joe's Pub

Posted by Camille Dodero at 9:52 AM, May 17, 2007

Photos by Nicole Ankowski

They Might Be Giants
Joe's Pub
May 16

By Rob Harvilla

Note: If you actually had sex while in high school nothing contained herein is going to make the slightest bit of sense to you.

Listen. No one's trying to sell you on the last (checks allmusic.com) (Jesus Christ) 11 years of They Might Be Giants' recorded output—after 1996’s direly underrated Factory Showroom, these dudes get spotty. "Prevenge" is one of my favorite TMBG songs of the past decade, and I haven’t even heard it. I just like the title. But “Am I Awake?” evokes glitchy insomniac paranoia better than anything on that Thom Yorke record, “Man It’s So Loud in Here” better evokes deadpan club-anthem vapidity than anything on that new Justice record, and seeing these gawky dudes live is still as oddly transcendent an experience as when you first heard “Particle Man” in junior high.

So they got a new album. The Else. Out in July. Except you can download it right now on iTunes. Very confusing. John Flansburgh (dude in the glasses, sired “Boss of Me”), commanding a gussied-up crowd at Joe’s Pub, improvises a little tune:

They Might Be Giants
Are playing the songs no one knows
From their new album

Tangent: When folks in the front row are singing along word-for-word with songs on an album sorta-released that day, thus clearly betraying the fact that they illegally downloaded the record weeks if not months ago, do you, the band, consider these people your biggest/best fans, or your shittiest? Do you take solace and pride in enthusiasm so rabid it compels them to steal your music?

For us law-abiding citizens unfamiliar with these tunes, we bob our heads politely to “I’m Impressed” (not really), “Take Out the Trash” (bitchin’ keyboards, very loud cowbell), “Climbing the Walls” (meh, as my fanatical TMBG fan brother would say), and “Careful What You Pack” (a tremendously disconcerting moment of evidently sincere tenderness). Midway through we’re thrown the bone of (checks allmusic.com) (Jesus Christ) 1989’s “Ana Ng,” wherein John and John’s sardonic rapport shines anew—Flansburgh hits a bum note during his backing vocals on the last chorus, and Linnell (dude with the nasally voice, sired the next nine best-known TMBG songs) singing lead in that immensely appealing nasally tenor and manning his keyboard with his immensely appealing business-casual indifference, stops singing and just glances at him, with no trace of anger, malice, or even distaste—a totally underplayed and benevolent yikes. These dudes are like a tall glass of chocolate milk. And “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” as gawky and goofy and giddy and 40-year-old virginal an anthem as you could ever hope for, is 150 glasses. A thousand. A couple thousand. The crowd gets noticeably more excited. The band—the Johns, two Dans (guitar/bass), and a drummer whose name isn’t amusing enough to warrant mention—gets much much more excited.

I want to like The Else. This is in some ways a higher compliment than actually liking a record I wish I didn’t like. (The Best Damn Thing, for example.) A coupla tunes resonate at Joe’s—Flansburgh’s “The Shadow Government” and Linnell’s “The Cap’m” collide at the intersection of mildly catchy and mildly amusing. (The Dust Brothers produced this thing. Were you aware of this? Why didn’t you tell me this?) But the Johns/Dans/etc., more so than anyone listening, seem sensitive to the fact that the new songs are essentially commercial breaks between “She’s an Angel” (sweet), “Twisting” (politely raucous), “Meet James Ensor” (hilariously didactic), their joyous cover of Cub’s “New York City” (profoundly stirring), and most bizarrely, the 21-part mini-opera “Fingertips” (batshit insane).

Tangent: Top 5 “Fingertips” episodes:

5. “Come on and wreck my car.”
4. “Are you the guy who hit me in the eye?”
3. “Please pass the milk please.”
2. “I’ve found a new friend underneath my pillow.”
1. “What’s that blue thing doin’ here?”

The first lines of “The Cap’m” go

Do you think there’s somebody out there
Someone else
Who’s better than the one you’ve got
Well there’s not
There’s not

They’re talking about themselves. They Might Be Giants don’t do this as well as they once did, but despite your suspicions otherwise, no one ever came along and did it better. No one will. Not even them.

Weekend Bender: Sunset Rubdown, Moby, Beirut

Posted by Camille Dodero at 2:53 AM, May 4, 2007

This Björk image never gets old.

FRIDAY, MAY 4
Sunset Rubdown, Get Him Eat Him @ Bowery Ballroom [SOLD OUT]
Langhorne Slim @ Union Pool
Six Parts Seven, Ghosts of Pasha @ Union Hall [Tix]
Northern State, Boyskout, Casper & The Cookies, @ Galapagos
Other Passengers, Dirty on Purpose @ Death By Audio
John Zorn’s Book of Angels @ Abrons Art Center [Info]
The Legends, Tiger Streiffen, Soft, The Victoria Lucas, Overlord, Clear Tigers @ Cake Shop Two-Year Anniversary

SATURDAY, MAY 5
Sage Francis, Chelsea Market's Old Portico Space [Info; Free]
Bjork, Konono No. 1 @ United Palace Theatre [Info]
Konono No. 1 @ Bowery Ballroom [Info]
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Love of Diagrams @ Webster Hall [Tix]
Dan Deacon, Death Set, Despot, High Places @ Silent Barn [Info]
Brightblack Morning Light @ Mercury Lounge [Tix]
Cass McCombs, Arboretum, the Jewish @ Don Pedro's [Info]
John Zorn’s Book of Angels @ Abrons Art Center [Info]
Aa, Vampire Weekend, Cause Co-Motion! @ Cake Shop Two-Year Anniversary
Balthrop, Alabama + Scary Mansion @ MonkeyTown [Info]
Richard Bacchus, Mad Juana @ Lit Lounge [Info]
Unsane, Indecision @ Europa
Shivkumar Sharma & Zakir Hussain @ Town Hall [Info]
Juan Atkins @ Sullivan Room [Info]
The Rub w/ DJ Ayres, Cosmo Baker & DJ Eleven, and Certified Bananas @ Southpaw [Info]
Moby, Curses, Knifehandchop at Studio B [Tix]

SUNDAY, MAY 6
Beirut, Final Fantasy @ Bowery Ballroom [SOLD OUT]
Cass McCombs with Arboretum @ Mercury Lounge [Tix]
The Clientele @ Maxwell's [Tix]
Brightblack Morning Light @ Southpaw [Tix]

Live: Art Brut Says You Should Listen to the Hold Steady

Posted by Camille Dodero at 3:59 PM, April 19, 2007

No, he doesn't have a mustache anymore.

Art Brut at Studio B
Date: Wednesday, April 18
Opener: O'Death (I missed them)
Rating: 7.9

Hate to take a mirror to this Web-only real-life-show report and reflect it back to this reckless digital space, but it's nearly impossible to consider Art Brut's live show last night at Studio B without noting that the Internet was present — invisible perhaps, but itching from somewhere beyond like a phantom limb.

How else would we all have known the opener, "Pump Up the Volume," and been able to sing along with a wincingly familiar line (at least to anybody who's ever made a crush wait while you engineered an iTunes playlist — cough — sorry, J), "I know I shouldn't/And it's possibly wrong/To break from your kiss/To turn up a pop song?" And why else would someone shout, "How much does mastering matter?" when frontman Eddie Argos randomly solicited questions. If you didn't have a right-click trigger finger, you must've been confused.

A refresher: earlier this month, the PR people for this "meta-punk-rock" five-piece pre-released five songs, a 4545454545% preview of Art Brut's upcoming June release It's a Bit Complicated. (Download here.) The caveat? These early versions were "unmastered." There're any number of theories about why Downtown would do this and still hope to make money on their investment: a preemptive strike against another Ys incident; testing the hypothesis that if you're nerdy enough to be on the leak tip, you're gonna want the real things when they become available; hoping that some new material will help sell out all Art Brut's scheduled US shows; thinking that giving away a bite makes people less hungry; licensing potential; er, goodwill?

With a vehemently self-aware band like this, I'm gonna say that incentive doesn't matter. What does is that we fell for it. I ended up small-talking with a few people standing beside me who turned out to be college pals with Threadster. One of them was like, "Hey, Art Brut have five free new songs on the Internet, you should download them." And I was like, "Um, yeah, I spent the day with them on repeat," and him being like, "Me too!" We, like, temporarily bonded over the sort of old-school concert preparation that technology has made less embarrassing then back in high school when you used to blast the band you're about to see on your car stereo en route to the show and forget to turn it off and having everybody sneer, all like, Ugh, what're you, a Parrothead?

But having already digested some of the new record's jokes made the one-liners we were hearing for the first time all the more sweeter. Most notably, the best break-up line I've heard this week from "People in Love," purportedly track 4 from It's a Bit Complicated: "People in love sit around and get fat/I didn't want us to end up like that." (I might be misquoting the initial verb/adverb-combo here, so it could be "lay around" or something, but the incision is just as deep.) Also, another thing I didn't know from the Internet. . . Argos has shifted his usual "Emily Kane" repartee: stopping the song midstream to explain that the tune's not about the specifics of Argos being in love with an ex-girlfriend named Emily Kane, but being 15 and being in love with being in love. Now he just stops the song midstream to explain that he used to stop it midstream to tell people to forget about their exes, but now he's changed his mind and his only message is that you should never listen to be people in bands. Except the Hold Steady and the Mountain Goats. Yeah, that's what he said.

Of course, there were the expected tracks, songs available in other places besides the Web: "Good Weekend," "Moving to LA," "My Little Brother." But I still don't think this band could've sold out the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday and then played a pretty packed early set at Studio B on Wednesday without the Internet. It's not that they wouldn't have had the promotional channels fifteen years ago — perhaps true, but that discussion's about twenty books and seven years moldy — but rather that they wouldn't have the context. They are a band that's so self-referential, so unpretentious about pretentiousness, yadda yadda, that without hypertext's endlessly reflective connections, they'd be, I dunno, a Brit-punk version of Witch's Hat, a self-parody of self-parody that turns into suck-parody. How's that for meta. Not very?

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Previous experience: The Internet.
Personal bias: The Internet.

Weekday Joints: Soulwax, Art Brut, Battles

Posted by Camille Dodero at 1:00 AM, April 16, 2007

Have you ever had a human banana honk your (man-)hooters? Peelander-Z would be happy to oblige.

MONDAY, APRIL 16
Gang Gang Dance, Professor Murder, Yacht @ Hiro Ballroom for Rhizome Benefit [Tickets: $35!]
A Benefit for Callum Robbins: Bob Mould, Radio 4, Harmony Rockets (feat. members of Mercury Rev), the Annuals plus more special guests @ Bowery Ballroom [Tix $25]
Smoosh, The Postmarks, Creeping Weeds @ Knitting Factory [Tix]
Witch's Hat @ Cake Shop
King Kong, TK Webb @ Union Hall
An Evening with Chris Cornell @ The Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza [Tix]

TUESDAY, APRIL 17
Soulwax Nite Versions, Muscles @ Hiro Ballroom
Art Brut, Holy Hail, Ra Ra Riot @ Bowery Ballroom [SOLD OUT]
Jesse Malin, Holly Ramos @ Mercury Lounge [SOLD OUT]
Ozomatli, Outernational @ Webster Hall

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18
Ghostland Observatory @ Bowery Ballroom [Info]
John Vanderslice, St. Vincent @ Maxwell's [Info]
Art Brut, O'Death @ Studio B [Tix]
The Radio Soulwax Tour with 2MANYDJS (11 pm) @ Studio B [Tix]
Son Volt @ The Fillmore East at the Irving Plaza [Tix]
Wooden Wand and The Vanishing Voice, GHQ, D Charles Speer @ Silent Barn
Oakley Hall, The Woods @ Union Pool
Patti Smith and Her Band @ Hiro Ballroom [SOLD OUT]
Ratatat @ Webster Hall [SOLD OUT]

THURSDAY, APRIL 17
The Postmarks, Die Romantik @ Union Hall
Mr. Yee's Secret Opium Party: Peelander-Z, Aloke, Right on Dynamite @ Luna Lounge
John Vanderslice, St. Vincent @ Mercury Lounge [SOLD OUT]
Hot Chip, Tussle @ Webster Hall [Tix]
Battles, O'Death, Dirty Projectors @ NYU
Balkan Beat Box, Golem, DeLeon @ Bowery Ballroom [Tix]

Photos: Kiiiiiii! at the Cake Shop

Posted by Camille Dodero at 2:36 PM, April 5, 2007

Kiiiiiii!
Cake Shop
April 4
Bad Photos by Cami D

Kiiiiiii! were so awesome last night, so ridiculously awesome that I am now wearing a Kiiiiiii! T-shirt. Tonight, they're at the Cinders Gallery in Williamsburg. If you don't go and see them before they return to Japan, you're a jackass.

DOWNLOAD
Kiiiiiii!, "(The World According To) Carp and Sheep"