hope this life won't get you down

I was half hoping the Handsome Furs gig be something like the zombie video for their single “I’m Confused”; guess the fine young cannibals were out of commission last night, but that’s alright ma, we’re only bleeding. Eyes were saucered on the pair of excitable spouses, as Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry manage to readily recreate the ragged inferno of the hopeful rock songs showcased on their latest Face Control. Dan was in great voice, his guitar howling with admirable resolve, and their performance of the Face Control songs like “Nyet Spasiba” and “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” really have that whole fashionably uncouth insouciance nailed down so well. Everything you need to know about this band, it seems, is in Dan’s description of Handsome Furs being when he and Alexei first locked eyes – the love buzz in that momentous instant.

it's always fun and games until

Future’s looking pretty bleak for me personally of late, so it’s no better time than now for the music of Aimee Mann it would seem – that she performed her songs with such equanimity, while drawing on materials from almost all points of her career, is an added bonus anytime. Take her pensive delivery of “Amateur”, always one of my favourite out of her back catalogue, starting out a bit unsure, somewhat in the vein of the floundering confidence implied in her lyrics (“Despite conclusions I drew, there was a chance you’d surprise me”), then gathering momentum, tentatively, along to the sparse instrumental arrangements (this night, it was just Aimee and her two mates). Nice surprise too that she pulled off a rendition of “Invisible Ink”, probably one of the more surreal breakup songs that have been kicking around in my head somewhere. Then there were the few songs that found wider commercial applications in the frog-friendly movie Magnolia (the melancholic melodies of “Save Me” sounds particularly lucid, up close), where you find Aimee’s brittle songwriting still works best when listened as straightforward pop without too much interpretation. Modern life is rubbish, for sure – and so may it be, for we’re long wised up to that fate anyway – but it bears reminding that sometimes it really takes a sublime songsmith like Mann to make one feel a little less lost in space.

(Setlist)
The Moth
Nightmare Girl
Momentum
Build That Wall
Par For The Course
This Is How It Goes
Amateur
Wise Up
Save Me
Red Vines
You Could Make A Killing
Little Tornado
Little Bombs
31 Today
Freeway
Invisible Ink
That’s Just What You Are
Video
Ghost World
Deathly
Driving Sideways
Voices Carry

speakers scream the same

We get older every year; Japan and Sonic Youth has some history between them going some way back, it seems, Lee Ranaldo reminiscing midway through the gig that they first played in Tokyo 20 years ago. An unseasonably festive atmosphere of rapt anticipation greeted these underground music veterans, and we weren’t short-changed – it didn’t quite have the feel of 1988-the-year-daydream-nation-broke transcendence, but for 67 minutes of revisionism genius it might as well have been. Experimental sound forms may be their lifeblood, but the sonic hardware from the recent The Eternal is more custom-made for enormous noise and blown speakers, the waves of mainlining guitar radiance they conjure up on new numbers like “Calming The Snake” and “Anti-Orgasm” are the stuff of forthright non-subjective joy. (Most rock dudes sound like real idiots saying shit like “Sonic Youth want all of you to have sex tonight”, as Thurston Moore did before kicking into the big dumb rock of “Anti-Orgasm”, but because it’s Sonic Youth and they did a Sister-era “Stereo Sanctity” that fucking blew your mind just ten minutes earlier and seriously left you believing you heard some otherworldly melodic noise you never heard before in your life, you let it slip as another one of those iffy propositions.) As with most things Sonic Youth, their performance spoke the language of despicably city-cool rock and roll, as epitomized by the hazy shades of electric blue on “Antenna” which the band seem to able to fearlessly stretch and bend at will.

(Setlist)
Sacred Trickster
No Way
Calming The Snake
Stereo Sanctity
Hey Joni
Anti-Orgasm
Poison Arrow
Antenna
Leaky Lifeboat
What We Know
Massage The History
Death Valley 69

a staged race has no thunder

As enthralling as their performance was, the short afternoon set Grizzly Bear put up recently during Tokyo’s Summer Sonic festival certainly felt rather insufficient for their glistening chamber pop to properly sink in with their audience. Especially after hearing the ever-wondrous “Lullabye” realized on stage, with the spacey subterranean shadings of the song circulating uneasily in the carnival atmosphere, I surely hoped for the band to do a bit more than just two songs from their Yellow House (2006) album, as great as the new Veckatimest materials are. The opening flourish of “Southern Point” perfectly captures the band’s essence as studio alchemists using the live stage more as a makeshift workshop of sorts, a flurry of ringing guitars calibrated to divine proportions. Their trademark fusion of archaic sound arrangements and unjustifiably beautiful harmonies gathered momentum from “Cheerleader” onwards, with Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen splitting even their turns on lead vocals, I can’t help the feeling the performance was compromised by the fact that Grizzly Bear had to rush through their set and had not enough time to properly stretch out their songs. A major quibble on my part then: which kind of left me there to stand and listen to the band close their set with their canorous rendition of “While You Wait For The Others” with somewhat vacillated emotions (“keeping up with the motions, still occupies our time/ You can hope for some substance, as long as you like”), the band exuding a curious tone of forewarning that felt a little out of place, present but not present.

(Setlist)
Southern Point
Cheerleader
Lullabye
Knife
Fine For Now
Two Weeks
Ready, Able
I Live With You
While You Wait For The Others

there is no such thing as

If I could write a book, preferably an escapist novel, this particular chapter would end somewhere with a loony tune or two Emmy The Great performed last night that made more sense than they really should. Emmy’s knack for quaint melancholy and her easy confidence on stage make the songs sound like wobbly faithful daydreams. A bit more about those two songs where her pop sensibility really shines through in the wild blazing nighttime. “MIA” pulled me in at first with the sheer simplicity of its central melody, slightly jaded but very pretty. The tweeness subsides upon subsequent listens and then the tragicomic ambiguities of Emmy’s lyrics, which she delivers in an almost happenstance manner, got to me. The lingering feel of the song, kinda like the dying flames of some button-down romanticism, is enigmatic and lovely. “Easter Parade” is, similarly, heartbreaking folksong stuff and more directly so, and seems to be addressing some manageable neurosis rather than getting tangled in needless metaphors – a sudden rush of warmth when I heard sing this one perhaps, never mind my reservations about such feelings.

plumb the feedback

For some reasons, I feel a bit compelled to try and keep up with the pace of posting here this month, whatever works. So again I’m recycling old stuff, this one written sometime back in 2007. I just bought my copy of The Eternal this morning; Sonic Youth is still amazing (more on that later of course). One afterthought about this gig review: I did not mention that former Pavement member Mark Ibold was on stage with the band in Shanghai that night, mainly because I somehow did not recognize him (embarrassing because I love Pavement too), and he’s now the latest official Sonic Youth member.

Jams blasting free

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crimes and gangs forgivable means of escape. – Federico Garcia Lorca

I have been a Sonic Youth fan for fuck-knows how long but watching them performing a bunch of songs I already know by heart in the triply crawlspace that is Shanghai, the colossal city which I will always have a love-hate relationship with, still gave me a sense of familiar unreality that is absolutely thrilling, the nostalgic surge inside the heart when the well-worn, chiming guitar intros to "Candle" rolls along right at the start of their performance. These veterans have soldiered on extraordinarily through an exemplary career – name me another gang of forty-fifty somethings who could kick it this hard – and few other bands old or new are as blessed with their ability to meld pop aesthetics with avant-rock instincts.

This was supposed to be a historical milepost in their long career trajectories too, Sonic Youth’s first two shows in the Republic of China (they played earlier in Beijing the night before).

And we had the additional benefit that they are touring behind one of their most pop-savvy albums in Rather Ripped (helps too that it has a high quotient of quality Kim Gordon songs) and while their set is saddled stitched to perfection, they were still able to throw in a few sonic surprises. Like making us wait till four songs in before launching into the frightening distortion vistas of "Mote" – and how they did it was spectacular, Thurston Moore skyscraping his gear while Lee Ranaldo punish the length of his guitar wire for effects, an ocean of furious freewheeling jams amplified to a perilous pitch. From there, the band doused the fire by segueing immediately into the clear-blue reverie of "Do You Believe in Rapture?", a performance that also hits home the truth for me that Sonic Youth’s underrated melodic finesse really does come through most brilliantly in a live setting.

Somewhere in between the newer Ripped songs and revisits to old classics from Sister and Daydream Nation (their blistering-fast version of "Silver Rocket" was particularly rad, with the velocities raised to almost revulsion levels I shit you not), they found room for a few oddities like a hard-boiled rendition of Lee’s "Skip Tracer", the only song they played from Washing Machine. Nothing’s sacred in their hands, it seems: right before playing the crowd pleasing "100%", a crass-sounding Chinese pop song came on the sound system while Thurston’s guitar feedback bubbled angrily all over the transmission.

As Sonic Youth tunneled towards the end of their set with the breathlessly long gauze of "Pink Steam", their unbridled enthusiasm is clear as they returned for two encores to round up two hours of thunderous bliss. They are still shaking hell, alright – superfreaky memories are made of these.

and the way it is, I can leave it all

I suppose the fuckest thing about Mogwai and their gig last night came when four songs into their set, they turned in a rendition of "Cody" that I must say I was completely unprepared for. Who would have thought that a bit of twinkly post-rock gone dark, companioned with nondescript singing, would be so accommodating to twinges of nostalgia? Indulge me if you will, but Come On Die Young happened some ten years ago, alright. Cut to the present and the slow wonder of this song performed on stage, everything about its monochromatic melodic glory, the way Stuart Braithwaite warble through the words ("old songs stay 'til the end, sad songs remind me of friends") -- while my outlook today is a world away from how I felt about numerous things ten years ago, from broken dream to dream this song has ranged, "Cody" still left me shaken. Besides this surprise inclusion of "Cody" on Mogwai's setlist, the only other acceptable expanation that I can come out with for why I enjoyed this performance so much more than the last time the band showed up in town (in 2006) was that the newer song materials the band was now playing were much stronger too. The better parts of their most recent album The Hawk Is Howling come closest to echoing the restrained sonic fury of Come On Die Young, as in tracks like "I Love You, I'm Going To Blow Up Your School", "Local Authority" and "Scotland's Shame" unfold in well-oiled motion and evolve into something much more deeply involving at their own pace. Appropriate or not, after an evening of music that called attention to the band's less well-advertised subtleties, Mogwai ended their two-hour set by shuffling off full gorge into viking berserker mode with a "Like Herod"/"Batcat" encore, the wavves of louder-than-you'd-imagine feedback abuse still sounding toxic, still brutally uplifting.