So I’m out on a casual stroll in downtown LA the other night, and what do I bump into? If you guessed an illegal rock show put on by a group of chicks armed with fireworks and dressed in bikinis, you guessed right. Photos below the fold.
The crowd wandered over after a show at the nearby indie club, The Smell. The noise brought down an angry loft-dweller from the nearby Higgins Building, and eventually the LAPD officer pictured below, who advised the musicians to considering holding future events a few blocks further down, away from residential developments.
For their part, the band — who go by the name Josh Taylor’s Friends Forever — played dumb, telling the cops that they didn’t realize so many people lived downtown these days.
Here’s a band that’s discovered how to create a blissful moment, and have the good sense to try recreating it with every song they play.
It goes like this:
Set the beat. Repeat.
Build the volume.
Holler.
It always works, and somehow they’re now hitting the climaxes so strong that it feels like the room is completely filled and nothing could ever be louder.
Sunday night at the 930 Club, they played most of the material off of their new album, Sound of Silver, but my personal favorite remains the electro-stomp “Tribulations.” Have a taste.
The first time someone told me about The Clientele five or six years ago, refinement was the selling point. This wasn’t you average pop band. This was a following. An exquisite cause that rewarded the discerning few cultivated to appreciate its recordings.
Like previous favorites of the quiet and shy among us — Felt, The Field Mice, Galaxie 500 — the band’s style goes a good way toward encouraging this view. The music is soft and whispery with a warm, bedroom sound and a striking capacity to communicate yearning and dread. In other words, everything a mopey, young indie kid could want. Have a look.
So it’s easy to go along with the theory. That is until you see them live, as I did last night at Black Cat, a nightclub here in Washington. That’s when you find out that The Clientele has secretly been a pop group all along.
I doubt even the most delicate live show could recreate the gentle arrangements and heavily treated sounds from The Clientele’s recordings. Real life isn’t so tidy.
But during its lively and at times ramshackle performance last night, there was a easy embrace of things alien to the group’s early releases. Pop refrains happily leapt from Alasdair MacLean’s throat. Songs that lilted up from home speakers like smoke rings easily gave way to towering guitar wank. Lively banter between the group and a sarcastic, if adoring, audience. One guy clapping to the beat.
It was pretty cool. And still soft and lovely when it needed to be. Good show.
Have a listen to one of the new songs from the God Save The Clientele, which is out this spring. It’s downright upbeat!
Why does this band play quiet songs? It’s such a waste.
And it’s never more obvious than when they drop all the crappy leftovers from indie rock (precious self-denial, sad-sack cutup lyrics, distrust of rhythms and anthems), quit babbling vague Holden Caulfield mumbo jumbo and shake some serious action.
There’s one thing Arcade Fire do well, and they do it very, very well. That’s the crescendo. The percussion locks in, the tempo and volume push upward into fifth gear, and everybody chants their head off. You can just soak it in. And it feels great.
So why do they even bother with the other stuff? It was obvious last night at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, where the crowd slept through the dirge-filled middle section of the show, only to burst to life when the band got back to the loud stuff.
I walked up to see Hot Chip perform last night at the 9:30 Club. If you haven’t heard these guys, they got some solid love last year and even some mainstream video play thanks to the funky breakout single “Over and Over.”
Alright show. I dug the slackerish twist they put on Kraftwerk’s style of stagecraft and when things really got rumbling the music hit with serious heft. It reminded me a bit of the industrial shows from my Chicago days put on by Ministry and KMFDM.
The biggest thing missing yet are the songs. Even the group’s best material often ignores the model of rising tension and dramatic, climatic release capitalized on by the rhythmic pop music I most enjoy. Sadly, the new songs they played didn’t show much progress there.
I strolled over to the Black Cat on 14th Street last Friday night to catch the Swedish folk singer Jose Gonzalez. Thanks to a few good words from the indie press and his inclusion in a popular Sony Bravia advertisement, Jose, whose parents are Argentinean, seems to be making inroads in the States this year. The crowd was larger than I expected and surprisingly keen to see a frumpy European diddle around on his guitar for a most of an hour.
I dig Jose’s whisperish, Nick Drake-like sound, but his original compositions often leave me wanting more. I’m a melody guy. I like my songs sharp with personality and emotion. And most of Jose’s tunes are, like Drake’s, brief, elliptical and abstract. That’s why I think his strongest performances come when he covers other songs. The Sony ad is a remake of a song called “Heartbeats” by another Swedish band, The Knife. And, like his excellent covers of Kylie Minogue’s “Hand on you Heart” (for a little fun, compare the original video to the cover) and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” it succeeds wonderfully in bringing out the melancholy and dispair hidden in an otherwise upbeat song.
The Springsteen cover is, I think, particularly fitting. Despite its anthemic chorus, “Born in the USA” is hardly a celebration of America. By removing the refrain and unplugging the amplifiers, Jose emphasizes the lyric’s narrative of a Vietnam vet who returns home alienated from society and scarred by war. Click here to download an .mp3 recording of Jose’s recent live performance.
