She Can Sing Like a Bird in a Cage

In Which I Present in Great Detail the Stuff I Listened To in the Year 2007; Wherein I List Certain Songs, Albums, or Concerts That Mattered to Me This Year; And Where I Ponder Whether Or Not I Still Pay Attention to New Music

The first fact is a cause for concern: I only saw one concert this year. The Pogues in March at the Congress Theatre.

Seriously?

No, wait. I saw Camera Obscura in February.

Still, only two concerts. Damn.

That's important, though. My mind and spending money was elsewhere this year, but that's for another post.

Okay, here's the list, making its triumphant return after taking a year off in 2006. (The winners were Belle and Sebastian and Mates of State, by the way.)


Rilo Kiley: Under the Blacklight

It might be their best album, but I don't listen to it all that much. Maybe because it makes me feel horribly dirty after I finish it. It's all random sex and skanky L.A.

The Darjeeling Limited Soundtrack

Yes, I liked the movie. And yes, I got the soundtrack. Which I like a lot. I accept my position as one of the Anderson Faithful. He is Mighty.

LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver

I didn't spend a lot of the year listening to new music (mostly a lot of Bob Dylan and Wagner opera, to be honest.) The albums assembled for my 2007 faves are mostly the latest offerings of bands I got into several years ago. The last time I found a new band that I went ape-shit for was Mates of State, a couple of years ago.

At least I made the decision to buy Sound of Silver, because "All My Friends" kicks fucking ass, to paraphrase Barry at Championship Vinyl. Best single I heard all year.

Paul McCartney: Memory Almost Full

I struggle with my belief in Paul McCartney like some people struggle with whether or not there's a Jesus. Over lunch on Sunday I spent a good twenty minutes discussing with my friend Eric whether or not Paul should have messed around with Let it Be.

But anyway, Paul put out a new album this year, right after a fairly decent one the year before. So he's kind of on a roll. A few songs are kind of bleah, but a good chunk of 'em are some of the best stuff I've heard Paul do in a long, long time. (The folky stomp of "Dance Tonight", for one.)

There's still the sappy, needy Paul, who wants to forever escape from Lennon's long shadow, and there's also the Paul that drags out John's name every time he starts talking about how "this album was written like me and John used to write!" And of course there's "Ebony and Ivory."

But then there's "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Jet", and now "Vintage Clothes." And that early frenetic-Little Richard-howling-mad energy that seemed to possess him until '65 or so. That has to count for something.

It was freezing outside while I loaded the students onto the bus, and to keep warm, and to entertain the kids, I belted out "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" at the top of my lungs like some crazed evangelist. I still believe in Beatles.

The New Pornographers: Challengers

It's great. They're always great. The Dan Bejar songs are brilliant. Neko is a sexy force of nature. But that's about all you can say about Challengers. Still, a good New Pornos album is 99% better than anything else out there.

The Shins: Wincing the Night Away

Predictably indie brilliance. Does that make sense? "Turn on Me" was lovely, and they were great on Saturday Night Live. A band I have yet to see live.

Wilco: Sky Blue Sky

Some lovely tunes on here, and I understand why Tweedy wanted to write some really nice songs for a change, but it really drags in the middle. If it wasn't for "Impossible Germany" and "What Light" this would have been kind of a shitty record. I spent more time listening to the live tracks from Sunken Treasure.

Radiohead: In Rainbows

This past summer I directed an original adaptation of Julius Caesar. I tried to merge Shakespeare and Hail to the Thief, and it more or less succeeded, because both were about power, corruption, and lies (a quick nod to New Order, which also played a part in the production.) For the longest time I couldn't wrap my head around Thief properly, not like I had with The Bends or Kid A (still their best album.) But it all fell into place perfectly while I was working on that show.

In Rainbows is another great album, but once again I don't think I have it quite figured out yet, and that's what's great about Radiohead: they're so far ahead of everything else out there, it sometimes takes a few years to digest it all and catch up to what they're doing.

The Arcade Fire: Neon Bible

I didn't really get what the big deal was about The Arcade Fire when I bought Funeral a while back. Heard they were good live, the album had a few bright spots, but overall.....eh?

Then I bought Neon Bible and I became a convert. After a bunch of decent half-albums from the old standbys, this was the only album that I really, truly cared about this year. "Antichrist Television Blues" makes me pee my pants it's so good.

Good Music That Made Me Say Meh: Or, Gee, That Wasn't As Great As I Thought It Would Be

Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

More of the same. I haven't heard anything truly outstanding by them since most of the stuff from The Moon and Antarctica.

Bruce Springsteen: Magic

I'm not sure why people thought this was so brilliant. I still stand by Devils and Dust as the better album. And the Seeger album was fun, and different, at least. Magic is growing on me, though, so we'll see.

Feist: The Reminder

Well, it's kind of good, but because of the iPod commercial and fucking Grey's Anatomy I can't associate the songs with anything else.

Album That I'm Sure I'll Love Because I Got All the Rest, But For Some Reason I Haven't Gotten Around to Purchasing

The White Stripes: Icky Thump

But the fact that I haven't bought it yet says something, doesn't it...?



So there was, what--one album that I really got into this year? That can't be right. There was plenty of music that really got to me this year, but a lot of it didn't come from the year 2007. Right now I'm listening to Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and there's this song on there called "She Belongs to Me," and I have to admit--I've never heard that song before. Or at least I never noticed it before.

And it's brilliant. It's so good, and it's like hearing a Dylan I never knew before. I had that moment a couple of years ago when I heard "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" for the first time. I was at rehearsal, and Brems was playing some music, and the song just jumped out over whatever I was doing, and I was like, "Jesus, I never heard that one before."

I would have, had I gotten around to buying Highway 61 Revisited. But I hadn't.

You see, I hold Dylan back a bit. I could have gone out and bought all the essentials a while back when I really started getting into him, but I held off, just buying an album here and there, every year or so. I want there to still be surprises left in a guy like Dylan.

I do the same with The Beatles. That's what The White Album, or A Hard Day's Night is for me: that last bit that I don't quite know backwards and forwards, the stuff that'll still sound new to me.

Nick Hornby had it right when he talked about that moment when you hear a song by an artist that hasn't been played to death on classic rock stations:

If you can hear Dylan and The Beatles being unmistakenly themselves at their peak--but unmistakenly themselves in a way we haven't heard a thousand, a million times before--then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their spirit, and it's as close as we'll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to know what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren't expecting them, or anything like them.

from Songbook.

The Pogues

March 5, 2007
The Congress Theatre, Chicago

Last night The Pogues played Chicago as a complete unit for the first time in over 15 years. I had the great fortune of seeing them last year in New York over Paddy's Day weekend, but once I heard they were coming here I scooped up a couple of tickets and convinced Duder to come check 'em out.

If there's anything that Duder loves, it's big crowds and a crappy part of town. Oh yeah, and I made him stand down in front with all the big obnoxious drunk guys. The crowd itself was pretty interesting: a lot of Chicago Irish mixing with next-gen youth apparently living the 80s punk scene all over again.

Girl in a Coma opened the show, a trio of Texas girls who tore that shit up.

The band finally took the stage and it was great. I was down in the thick of it, singing along with every word and still amazed that Shane MacGowan looked pretty good, all things considering.

Set list hasn't changed much from a year ago, and well, it hasn't changed much in 15 years. Rumors of new music float around, but Shane says it might be best to stay out of the studio if they want to stay together. Fair enough, I suppose, but I hope more comes out of this than a few rounds of reunion concerts.

"Fiesta" closed the show, we ate The Greatest Burritos Ever, and headed home, grumbling about having to get up and go to work in the morning. Thankfully we kept our Guinness intake to two apiece.

Incredible show, from start to finish. It was the opening night of the tour and they sounded tight and seemed to be having a good time. Shane had trouble keeping up with some of the faster songs ("Bottle of Smoke" was a bit rough), but then they slowed things down with "A Rainy Night in Soho" and Shane proved that he can still get it done.

Here's a quick bit of video from the show: the first 60 seconds of "The Body of an American" for ThePhoenixNYC. Enjoy the show next weekend, my friend.

NOTE: Video link was showing up funny in IE. Apologies for those of you not using Firefox; I imagine the pictures sometimes are coming up a bit oversized. I only use IE at work and don't notice when things are off-kilter in different browsers. I'll work on this later and try and get it fixed.

Camera Obscura at the Logan Square Auditorium

Camera Obscura
Logan Square Auditorium
2/3/07


A belly full of Greek food does not prepare you for the biting, awful cold that hung around Chicago Saturday night. A three-minute walk from car to concert hall felt so, so much longer.

Inside the young bundled-up city-smart fashionables ordered their drinks and listened to The Essex Green open the show. Brooklyn band, one of the many pop-heavy male-female combos around these days that plays that lush 60s-influenced sound that's heavy on harmony and bouncy melodies. Good stuff.

Logan Square Auditorium--third floor ballroom, still in pretty good shape. Probably an old dance hall where people did the Jitterbug and the Lindy Hop while they saved the world from European fascism. Wood floors and ceiling fans, and no one's smoking so the air is clear and fresh.

Camera Obscura are a quiet indie pop band from Glasgow, Scotland. You could easily write them off as a pale imitation of Belle and Sebastian or just one of the many 60s-centric indie bands I talked about earlier, but they usually rise above that pat description to make some pretty gorgeous music.

Center spotlights weren't on for the first part of the set, so Tracyanne Campbell played her quiet, pretty songs in the dark for a while. Lighting in general wasn't great and so the pictures I have are the best I could do. The band stuck to the new album, mostly, and only dipped into the older stuff here and there. I was happy to hear the B-side "Lemon Juice and Paper Cuts" and kept hoping to hear "Lunar Sea" and a few others, but their set ended too early for the deep cuts.


"Razzle Dazzle Rose" ended the encore and the show was over. Good song to close with, too; simple lyrics, written by Tracyanne, but they read like some adventurous 19th century Scottish love poem mixed with a shuffling drum beat and a lone trumpeter that sounds like some Mexican mariachi player that lost his way a long, long time ago.

On Music

A few years ago the band Wilco used to do a show the night before Thanksgiving. They'd tour here and there but would always play to the hometown crowd as they returned home for the start of the holidays.

In my hometown, as I'm sure it is done all across the country, people gather at the local bowling alley and catch up with each other and get really plastered.

Both of these anecdotes have a point, so stay with me.

At one particular Wilco pre-Thanksgiving show at The Riviera I was stuck towards the back of the crowd, near the bar. No one seemed to be paying much attention to the show and were instead chatting away, no doubt catching up with old friends now returned to Chicago for the giving of thanks the next day.

Obviously it really pissed me off. This was a really good band, my favorite at the time (probably still), and people were acting like they were at the fucking bowling alley.

My point is this: I hated those people as much as I claimed to hate the college hippies who spend their summers getting toasted at various outdoor music festivals.

It's not like the cool people hang in the city clubs and the losers go to outdoor festivals. There are plenty of both at both.

I say this not because of any negative reaction to my previous post about Coachella (there wasn't any that I know of), but because I was very unsatisfied with what I wrote last week. It was a rushed, cranky essay that was more about me relieving some job-related stress and less about a legitimate critique of a music concert.

After I wrote it and hit publish, it nagged at me and it wouldn't go away, especially after I turned out a much finer piece of writing about my late-night b-boy visitor. That felt good; the other entry just felt like amateurish writing, an immature rant, a reminder of my early writings on here where a complaint about a bad commercial felt worthy of a post. Plus it probably did piss off a few people who perhaps liked being a college hippie who attends/attended large outdoor festivals.

But it brings up a larger problem I have come across: the near-impossibility of writing about music, or offering up any general criticism of it, positive or negative.

I've been wanting to write up a quick something about how good The Shins were on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, and was searching for some video, and along the way read various comments and reactions to the performance.

Pick a few of the following phrases and splice them together any way you want and you'll come up with a general idea of what fan reaction was, and what amounts to any typical internet discussion about indie/alternative music:

indie fanboys sellout awesome nervous corporate Sub Pop rule sucked balls heart Garden State overrated beautiful I was into The Shins way before that! pussies newalbumkicksassthey'renotasgoodastheholdsteady.

It's the same with movies or books or tv shows and any other mention of pop culture on a message board or comments section. We're all part of the discussion and we all have our opinions and people get so passionate about their loves and hates and it all starts sounding the same after a while.

There's the "first" guy, the girl who absolutely loved it, the snarky guy who just quotes Family Guy episodes, and the person who thinks it was pretty bad and is a clear sign that there is no hope left for American culture.

So are all opinions equal, all viewpoints the same? Should we just not take a critical eye at anything and instead say "I love it all!!!" Somehow that doesn't seem right to me, but the past few days I've been really preoccupied with the idea of opinions and criticism and how it all goes down on this worldwide internet community we've all created.

There is good shit, and there is shit. And there is some good shit that other people think is shit, and vice versa. And rarely is there a thing any more that many, many people consider to be awesome and wonderful. Instead you have little pockets of taste that are constantly at war with each other, each hoping that their version of what's cool will get to the top of the pop culture pyramid.


So, to sum up: outdoor festivals still suck, but if you like 'em, by all means enjoy yourself.

And The Shins were really good on Saturday Night Live.

Just Like Coachella

Nick posted the lineup for the 2007 Coachella festival and I noticed that practically every goddamn band that has broken up in the past ten years is now reuniting in order to play the super-hyped up desert show this April.

Rage Against the Machine is getting all of the media attention, but it's significant to point out that the Happy Mondays, Crowded House, and (most importantly) the Jesus and Mary Chain are also re-forming and have slots at the two-day festival.

The Chili Peppers are playing, surprise, but they should have broken up a long time ago.

I don't like the Chili Peppers.

Photo courtesy of leelee025's Buzznet page.

Coachella is cool, I guess, although this habit of having a big '80s or '90s alternative act reunite to play to a bunch of 20-year olds is already getting kind of tired.

Maybe I only say this because I won't be attending the festival, which features a lot of really kick-ass bands, but I'll be honest: I fucking hate massive outdoor music festivals. Fuck the crowds, fuck the heat, fuck the overpriced beer and fuck the crappy sound and visuals.

And fuck the smelly college hippies that always seem to infest those damn things.

Don't mind the snark: I'm teasing, of course. I hate the festivals, not the people who go to them. Even the hippies. Everyone loves college hippies. Or not.

Now, lest I offend, if you're a college hippie and a big fan of outdoor music festivals and think that I'm talking about you, well, of course I'm not. I'm talking about those other people that really annoyed the piss out of you when you were at Pitchfork or Lollapalooza last summer. Those guys. You're alright by me. You're reading this, aren't you? That makes you cool in my book. Even if you are a hippie.

Anyway, give me a small club in the city like the Metro or the Riviera, were I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain play 17 years ago for my first concert. I was a small-town white-bread kid who barely knew what decent music was and I had never seen so many black leather jackets in all my life, but it was an eye-opening experience and I've never grown tired of it since.

The Perfesser Gets Out of the House

Heard the Mates of State were playing in Dekalb Monday night. Pretty much my favorite band to listen to right now, and so I ran through the list of people that would want to catch a show on a Monday night. It took me about 20 minutes to realize that a good friend of mine lived in Dekalb, and so yesterday afternoon I cleared off the desk and jumped on the tollway west to the home of NIU, a school I attended for a brief time ten years ago.

Since then they've added a few things, including The House Cafe, a pretty damn decent place to see a show. First had a few beers and some food at a pub across the street and shot the shit about the new Dylan album and Limelight plans. Before long Brems ran into a guy he went to school with and so we had another round with Kyle and Amber before heading back out into the rapidly cooling air to join the line for the show.

By the time the show really got going I should have been in bed but that was the last thing on my mind. Kyle and Amber were easy to talk to, like people I had known for years and years. Small-town hipsters, like the guys I used to hang out with during my year at the community college. People who spend more money on gas to get to the show than for the actual tickets.

Brems ran into another guy he knew, a former high school teacher (which now made me not the oldest guy at the all-ages show, thankfully). Then I saw a guy named Justin that I knew back from my days directing high school musicals in the old hometown. Suddenly we're all part of this strange interconnected group that stretched from Sandwich to Southern Illinois University.

Shouted to each other over the opening band, drank Blue Moon on a Monday, weaved through the latest version of young indie/emo fashionistas discussing Conor Oberst trying to find the pisser, it all took me back about ten years and change. Nothing much changed and a lot had changed. Mates of State took the stage and for all I knew it could have been Belly or Velocity Girl or fucking Catherine Wheel.

The band kicked some major ass and I knew most of the tunes and did that strange little stuck-in-one spot bob and weave that you do in a packed club.

Mostly played stuff from Bring it Back and the EP with "Goods" on it. a husband-and-wife duo, keyboards and drums. Kori Gardner does some wicked shit with those keyboards, creating a wall of sound sometimes rivaled The New Pornographers for pop brilliance. Jason Hammel did the duties of drummer and bass player and somehow managed to make two or three voices come out of his mouth at the same time.

The Mates finished up their set and we all filed out and said our goodbyes and as I drove eastward towards home I asked myself why would I possibly have wanted to be anywhere else in the world?

A great night.