When the Sky Drops All Those Feathers, Take Two (School of Seven Bells @ South Street Seaport/Alela Diane & Sharon Van Etten @ Union Hall, 8-14-09)

Hey!  This whole page disappeared for a day, everything, pffft, gone!  Then against the everyone's better instincts it came back.  So let's finish this here:

I have meant to spend more time with School of Seven Bells (myspace), both with their album Alpinisms and with their live show; that didn't happen, here, I had another gig to get at.  So7B is Benjamin Curtis late of Secret Machines and twin sisters late of a heavily! punctuated! band!  Two guitars, one keyboard.  Curtis stands center, slightly recessed, pounding his strings and occasionally toying with a box that controls beats or playback or whatever.  On either side of the stage the sisters stand with their instruments and emit high priestess warblings.  Thankfully one of them is excitable and human, if she weren't the whole crowd might turn into a drooling BrooklynVegan comments section, oooo, girls, twins, purty, gawrsh.

Anyway.

I have this horrible feeling they're singing about matters spiritual, getting new agey or Zen or maybe even witchy.  (The lyrics mention benediction, and leaving the body behind, etc.)  I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, so long as they don't expect me to take any of that seriously.  I stopped doing drugs in high school and am firmly comfortable with my own concept of the universe (we're all a bunch of meat-slabs meant to suffer and die and the best we can hope for is an honest laugh and a decent turkey club sandwich and the occasional half-hearted round of oral sex).  I hope they do not expect me to feel all glowy and transformed when I listen to their music.  "It's safe to say saving you saved me" is a lovely line, I think I saw it on a Stop & Shop circular once.

Because of when and where they're at, these Seaport shows draw odd, talky crowds.  Curious tourists - one couple asked me before the show what type of music it would be, I said "indie" (as if that explains anything), they asked if that "was like jazz" -- crane necks with post-bell Wall Street brahs (fewer of those there at this one, but then there might be fewer of those in general right now?) and concertgoing freeloaders.  School of Seven Bells puts out a decent amount of sound, which is certainly what some people near me were asking for during The xx.  I'm guessing it pleased the guy who, off to the right of the stage, spun around in place so hard you were convinced he had either a plan to knock the planet off its axis or a serious inner ear disorder.

The band was good!  I left through the loosely packed audience as the more enthusiastic sister enthused about how many people were there.  I regretted having to go.  But there were a couple reasons I'd resigned myself to a basement full of folktards in Park Slope.

Sharon Van Etten - I Wish I Knew (mp3)(buy)

It seems to be assumed that picking up a guitar and blathering loose verse about your feelings entitles you to a sudden intimacy with an audience.  I've never bought that, not one bit.  Sudden intimacy is under the best circumstances an accidental thing, and getting on stage solo acoustic is as much a calculated lookatmeism as painting on spandex and rubbing your crotch into the faces in the front row, only less honest about its contrivance and its intent.  The guy/girl-with-guitar is so rarely special because it's so easy to do and so often badly done and when there's at least a couple generations out there demanding spoiled-child attention all you want to do is look upon all of them with contempt.  Stop with the noise pollution, go and get negligible blogs like the rest of us.

Sharon Van Etten (myspace - blog) is a local singer/songwriter who has developed a devoted following and gotten some good ink for her firstish album Because I Was in Love and... I just wasn't hearing it.  I do like the song above, it's sad and sane and refreshing in its humility.  But you come to "Much More Than That" and hear her sing, "Please don't take me lightly, I mean every word, whichever way you'd like to place them. One day I'll be a better writer..." and you start to understand why humility doesn't take out full page ads in Variety.  No fun being pummeled in the face by apologies.  But with other lines like "Have you seen what I once called my heart?  Have you seen my life that's now falling apart?" you start thinking that she's not being modest, she's being honest, and maybe Van Etten -- who doesn't have an especially endearing voice, either, by the way -- should just wait and get back to us when she has improved?

It takes about thirty seconds of seeing her on stage to see why protective sorts would want to hug her away from big meanies like me.  She's intensely shy up there, awkward in endearing ways.

Van Etten has a round, plain face topped by a straight bowl of brown hair that's pushed to one side in front.  Friday night she wore a white dress shirt tucked into tan slacks and brown boots; the ensemble, plus her long neck, made her look a bit like a stretched-out jockey.  Her guitar, a bright red electric with an oversized body, shrunk her back down.  When she sings high notes she turns her face from the mic, cranes her neck like a pelican swallowing a fish, rolls her wide eyes heavenward.

Between songs she kept her head at half-bow and mentioned how much she liked:  Australia's Luluc, who opened; and our headliner, whose first name she said with a sort of guilty awe; and Julie Fader, who joined her on "For You," whose band Great Lake Swimmers will feature Van Etten in support on some upcoming dates.  While messing with her capo she would sometimes start to say something than decide not to.  "I'll never know how to talk to people," she said, once.  "I just..."  She turned and maybe blushed.

When she reached the "I don't know shit" line in "I Wish I Knew," someone up front did the inevitable and tittered at either the swear or the sentiment, and their laughter made Van Etten smile for a second.

So, you know, awwww.

But if you get past the urge to coddle her and fail to project your own sympathies on to her songs then what you're left with is a rather dull honesty.  So a room that started out captivated got fidgety as things went along.

Alela Diane - Oh! My Mama (mp3)(buy)

"It's been a great night of music so far.  I hope I don't fuck it up."  Alela Diane (myspace) spent too much time between songs talking about how she'd just been on a bigger tour in Europe with a bigger band.  "It's a shame my dad's not here, because he can shred," she said, explaining that pops couldn't pass up a gig with his Grateful Dead tribute act.  "This is where the rhythm section usually comes in," she said in the middle of one song.

Why it was almost like being there!

Doesn't matter with whom she's playing (and here, that was Alina Hardin on guitar/vocals and Matt Bauer on banjo/vocals; both appear on her fine record To Be Still) because she's Alela Diane Menig!  She once killed a b'ar with her naked Volvo.  Her sound's built on rock of traditional Americana, her appeal's a hearty voice with a goodly yodel.  Simple sturdy stuff, like they used to.

In addition to originals, we got "Matty Groves" and Townes Van Zandt's "Rake."  And for the encore, the song that's above, from an older album of hers.  It is myth and it is lullaby and it was lovely, just lovely.

Also there:

Seaport:  20 Watts, 32ft/second, BrooklynVegan, The Clean Hippie, Rockscope, Tastes Like Caramel, Tear-n Tan,

Union Hall:  13melek (1/2, in Turkish(?)), Kevchino's Indie Music Blog,

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"I think I like writing songs instead of prose... You're being informed... it's almost like the words are already written you just have to find them."

She can do nothing wrong.  Solid solo performances of a couple of old songs that make up the new expanded First Love (still an import), plus a b-side and some talky stuff.

I especially like the part where she talks about how I was right about "Ed/Deadward."  Because I enjoy being right.  It happens so rarely.

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Numero Group organizes Yes please.

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With Fans Like These Dept.:

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

Not the official video! (via)

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So I got that Anjulie CD (more Corinne Bailey Blah than I'd hoped)... and it came with a sticker featuring a pull-quote from Arjan Writes.  "ANJULIE MIGHT VERY WELL BE THE NEXT BIG NEW THING."  Might!  Why not:  "'MEH' - BrooklynVegan Commenter?"

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" For fun, let's imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let's add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn't cover even five months of our health-care expenses."

You think the loud FOXsheep at the Town Hall meetings are scary?  Try this Atlantic piece.  If only it didn't make so much sense.

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"There are families of white folk who fled Detroit for the suburbs in the 60s who have now become so terrified of visiting the city that they're willing to disinter their dead loved ones and rebury them in their current neighborhoods. And it's not just one or two oddballs doing this-more than 1,000 bodies have been exhumed and moved since 2002. It's a full-blown trend." (via)

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Shiina Ringo, "Yume no Ato" ("A Scar From a Dream"), Expo 08.

We've been here before, but this performance of this song is so kicking everything's ass for me lately.

I think it was originally done for the first Tokyo Jihen album, and if you watch her do that version you'll see what I dislike about that band.  It's a beast with a lot of talented heads, each pulling in its own direction, getting nowhere.  The song was redone with arranger Neko Saitou for the film soundtrack supplement thing Heisei Fuuzoku and even the promotional performance for that feels stiff.  Dry run.

If the arrangement still feels a little staid and classical, it does exactly what it should do. It supports and elevates her performance, daring her upward.  The boys behind her -- still Jihen, I'm assuming -- look bored.  Good.

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'Two insanely rich men past their creative prime going on and on (and on and on) about rare race cars (in the middle of a horrible recession, which doesn't mean they shouldn't be rich, but perhaps they could be more sensitive in what they choose to spend their time going on and on [and on and on] about) forever? Not even talking about the cars themselves so much as talking about how they own the cars? And this is a "teaser"? As in "just whet the people's appetites for more of this"? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME. Who wants this? Please don't tell me that anyone actually wants this. Even Jay Leno/Jerry Seinfeld fans are like, "stop talking about these cars and start telling me jokes about airplane food."'

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"That's why, this Halloween, I'm putting a sign in my window that reads 'We Only Give Candy to Kids Who Appreciate the Classics'."  Rodney Anonymous is blogging again.

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Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be token attachments for cynically assembled indie rock.

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"I'm in a permanent state of Gaga."

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Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig gets Asher Roth to sign a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge.  Heads explode, eBay alerted.

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This a cappela cover of Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" is, weirdly enough, what I always pictured when I heard that song.  Except my version ended with a group decapitation.  (via)

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" I understood that the dark side of my middle-class, middle-American, suburban life was not drugs, paganism, or perversion. It was disappointment." (via)

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Oh, Quentin Tarantino.  We love you because you are enthusiastic and reliably retarded unpredictable.

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Quick!  Someone kill Bob Zemeckis before he turns Yellow Submarine into another freakish video game-looking thing

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"Probably the best film ever made on Staten Island, it's another reminder of how wide open and audacious the exploitation field was in the 70s and 80s."

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"Why can't I have a voice of my own? Many people don't happen to have a lot of recordings of themselves speaking. I have countless hours. All the old TV shows have been digitized. I've done several DVD commentaries. There are lectures, panel discussions, Q&A sessions. But I've been unsuccessful in my quest. I still sound like Alex, or in certain moods like Lawrence."

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" One of the nice gifts of the movie is that it reminds us that it took the better part of a decade for Julia Child to ponderously work out her cookbook. That she worked in a weird isolation from the means of distribution-who would publish her cookbook? She had no idea! Who these days spends a decade making something new and crazy that might never see the light of day? What a turn-off. What a pain."  

 

tags: the xx  sharon van etten  alela diane  emmy the great  shiina ringo  concert reviews  

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