Victoria Legrand scares the hell out of me. “Walk in the Park” may be one of the most beautifully crafted pop songs of our generation, yet seeing her croon lyrics like “In a matter of time, it will slip from my mind, in and out of my life, you would slip from my mind” while blankly staring beyond the physical world and thwarting about like Carrie White on prom night provokes a different sensation altogether. She wears only black, says little, and often spends the time she’s not singing lurched over her keyboards, letting her devil-may-care nest of hair flop about as if it were some crazed hippie on fire at Burning Man. If this were Salem 1692, it wouldn’t be out of line to assume that she wasn’t exactly on the town’s good side. And yet this instinctual fear is a big part of what makes Beach House so compelling: they push the limits of normalcy to the breaking point by building a world in which the everyday becomes increasingly bizarre, a world where something as mundane as a stroll through the neighborhood becomes the catalyst for a severe existential crisis. The songs, at their core, are rooted in a familiar pop formula. But rather than remain conventional, Beach House uses this tried-and-true structure to their advantage, reconstructing and pushing the boundaries to create a mood that is entirely their own. They’ve been branded as “dream pop”, and I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more fitting term. Their latest album, “Teen Dream”, makes a grand argument for the record as a cohesive whole, something that demands to be sat down with and listened to again and again. Their live show is no different. One wouldn’t think Prospect Park to be an ideal place to see this band, but the outdoor venue, coupled with beautiful weather and an approaching sunset, worked to their advantage. Somber tracks like “Silver Soul” and “Better Times” somehow became even more melancholy in this environment, while more upbeat songs like “Master of None” and “Norway” carried an added punch while remaining faithful to their recorded counterparts. With only organ, guitar and minimal drums behind her, Legrand’s voice remains the group’s most vital asset. When she asks, “Don’t I know you, better than the rest?”, I can’t help but hope she’s talking to me.

The National, however, carry a different kind of weight. Having honed their particular brand of American pop over the course of five albums spanning a decade, this show served as a sort of homecoming of sorts. Guitarist Bryce Dessner remarked that this is “the first show we’ve played where we can walk to”, and the band clearly felt at home here, playing a marathon 21 songs that drew from their last three albums. Their latest album, “High Violet”, has been universally praised as their finest effort, they recently played Radio City in addition to having being filmed by D.A. Pennebaker at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and last night wrapped up a sold-out show at Terminal 5. When I saw them in 2007 they were all casually dressed down in jeans and t-shirts; today they uniformly sport immaculate designer suits, yet still never fail to deliver dryly comical lines like “Sorrow found me when I was young—sorrow waited, sorrow won.” Some find their demeanor boring, but, like Beach House, this is a group that demands a sharp degree of attention before their craft can be fully realized. Songs like “Afraid of Everyone” and “Anyone’s Ghost” showcase singer Matt Berninger’s concise gift for constructing melodies that seem to trip over one-another, while highlights like “Mistaken For Strangers” and “Apartment Story” prove why Bryan Devendorf is the best drummer in rock music today—he’s less concerned with playing a backbeat than establishing a concise counterpoint to Berninger’s twisted musings on the quiet desperation of everyday people, adding a dramatic depth to stories that would likely fall flat otherwise. This is what makes the National such a compelling band: the ways in which each member adds their fabric to the whole, in the process creating movements that ultimately add up to be greater than the sum of their parts. The fact that they’re seeing success at this point shouldn’t be a revelation, but a relief.

Photo by: Jason Nocito

James Murphy didn’t waste much time in laying out the thesis that has come to define LCD Soundsystem. “Losing My Edge”, the band’s 2002 debut single, tactfully explores the theme LCD have spent the better part of the last decade pondering, namely, the fear of becoming inconsequential. “I’m losing my edge to all the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia from the unremembered eighties,” he dryly observes. “The kids are coming up from behind.” As the song progresses, our narrator desperately attempts to validate how cool he really is, and in the process increasingly comes off as illogical, bitter and, ultimately, irrelevant. “I’ve never been wrong… I used to work in the record store… I had everything before anyone.” But still, he hears that “everybody you know is more relevant than everybody I know.” In the end, when he concludes that “you don’t know what you really want,” it’s hard to tell whether he’s talking to himself or his audience.

Not that it matters. LCD Soundsystem’s most effective songs – “All My Friends”, “Someone Great”, “Yeah”— all deal with the desire to be cool without knowing exactly what being cool means, and the struggle of getting older without becoming irrelevant, of growing up without growing old and falling out. What makes LCD Soundsystem so enduring is the fact that Murphy, by so blatantly addressing these arbitrary issues, has become the epitome of cool for a music culture that generally considers anyone over the age of thirty to be about as useful as a payphone. “I’m 40 now,” Murphy said at the band’s surprise show at the Williamsburg Hall of Music last Thursday. “That means every band I saw had Fishbone opening up.”

His twisted sense of irony carries with it an honesty that’s admirable in the ADD-riddled internet age, where bands and critics have a distaste for genuine admiration and spend most of their time defining themselves by what they don’t like. He may be just as pretentious and snobby, but it’s a lot easier for the audience to take your criticism when you’re also making fun of yourself. It goes without saying that this band wouldn’t be nearly as effective if the lead singer happened to be 25 rather than 40. As most things LCD-related, context is essential. When today’s hero is tomorrow’s joke, foresight is everything. You can’t pull off songs like “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” and “Movement” unless you’ve spent an entire youth desperately trying to live out their scenario. Write what you know, as the saying goes. And it doesn’t hurt if you can make it dance.
If what he says is to be believed, This Is Happening will be the third and last record that Murphy releases as LCD Soundsystem. But if “Drunk Girls”, the band’s first single from that album, is any indication of stamina, we probably shouldn’t worry about Murphy running out of steam any time soon, regardless of what he may decide to call himself the next time around.

LCD Soundsystem are playing Webster Hall Monday, April 12.

Glenn Branca and his new ensemble will perform Ascension: The Sequel tomorrow (Saturday February 27th) at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village. Branca, the avant-garde king of the late 70’s/early 80’s No Wave movement, has a reputation for indulgence that nearly proceeds the primal, hypnotic and terrifying tsunami of drone that’s since become his signature. He has furnished a career out of applying the concept of rock music to classical structures, and the resulting conflict between the two genres has been an unrelenting source of inspiration for both the composer and his dedicated, cult-like following. Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore famously cut their teeth under Branca’s umbrella in the early 80s, and over the years his ensemble has swelled from two to over 100 members and back again. Depending on which side of the bed you happen to wake up on, hearing a movement like Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus) could come off as either mildly meditative or wholly disturbing, but never both. Upon hearing his Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses at the New Music Festival in Chicago in 1982, John Cage is reported to have said that his “feelings were disturbed” and went on to characterize Branca’s composition as the musical equivalent of fascism. No doubt if you synced up 1981’s Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus) to vintage footage of Hitler rallying the masses, the effect would be, er, disturbing to say the least. But odds are the experience left Cage feeling perhaps a bit too conventional. After all, Branca has never cared much for meddling in the realm of accessible, and his new album, marketed as the counterpoint to his 1981 masterpiece The Ascension, finds him exactly where he’s always been: On the fringe of tolerance, simultaneously intriguing his audience while testing their patience, obscenely loud and without apology.

Video after the jump.

Bradford Cox of Atlas Sound

Last Thursday’s performance at NYU’s E & L Auditorium was the first for Neon Indian since relocating to Brooklyn from Austin, Texas, and while the band played an exceptionally tight set, their particular brand of psychedelic electro-pop come off as flat, generic, and, tasteless. To the unfamiliar these songs don’t carry enough dynamic to remain interesting, and in this particular setting—one without booze, disco balls or dance floors—being forced to passively listen became a chore, though the band is not entirely to blame for this. Their most accomplished songs, many from last year’s Psychic Chasms (“Deadbeat Summer”, “I Should Have Taken Acid With You”), conjured the most elicit responses from an otherwise lifeless audience, many of whom were students either too scared to move or too cool to shake a leg. Neon Indian make music better suited for the dance floor, and it’s not hard to imagine them making a more compelling connection with their audience if they performed, say, at a club rather than a cramped auditorium on the fourth floor of a dorm hall.

But I couldn’t imagine a more fitting environment to experience Atlas Sound’s Paxil-fueled rants and musings. The thing about lead singer Bradford Cox is that he only seems to get better: Every record he’s released since Cryptograms with Deerhunter finds him building and reframing the dark and introverted lyrical themes he’s been exploring over the course of his short career within increasingly sophisticated arrangements. His appreciation of his peers is well-noted and he has a knack for emulating his heroes without forfeiting his increasingly unique viewpoint. Last year’s Logos is an infectious, moody work that continues to explore the discordant themes of his debut Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, only this time around Cox is more focused, experimental, and—perhaps most surprisingly—even somewhat positive. It’s no surprise that the best song off Logos is the one that sounds the least like Cox’s previous efforts—“Walkabout” features Panda Bear and succeeds by effectively bringing Cox out of his comfort zone and into sincere, outward-looking pop territory, building a gleaming melody over a riff sampled from The Dovers’ 1963 single “What Am I Going To Do?”. Performing alone, the stark setup worked to his benefit, particularly on songs like “Criminals” and “Untitled”, as it made clear that under all the dense album production lie economical and meticulously-crafted pop songs. However, Cox still has one foot heavily cemented in the experimental side of things, and he spent a good deal of the evening using a simple loop station to construct complex sound collages and rhythms, in turn creating an eerily transcendental environment that was difficult not to get lost in. By the end of the evening most members of the audience looked as if they’d spent the last six hours drinking NyQuill and staring directly into the sun. Which, in the world of Atlas Sound, is most definitely a good thing.

If Dan Boeckner and Alexi Perry have any shame about indulging in just about every cliché from the rock and roll handbook, they sure do a nice job of hiding it. As Handsome Furs, the married duo essentially lives out every angst-ridden teenagers’ dream. That is, to start a band, run away from home with a beautiful girl, collectively pour your hearts out to thousands of fans in dingy nightclubs, and live only for the moment, free from responsibility or material temptations, as outsiders in an otherwise homogenized, grinding adult world. While maybe far from the truth, the band’s success more or less lies on their ability to sustain this myth, and this do very, very well, both on and off the stage. It doesn’t hurt that they write some of the best rock songs this side of Iggy Pop and Glenn Danzig, but history has proven how far a little attitude and swagger goes in this line of work.

Their recent set at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ leaned heavily on material from their most recent album, 2009’s Face Control. Boeckner has an uncanny ability to rewrite the same song again and again without ever becoming tiresome or repetitious, and the subtle dynamics of tracks like “Legal Tender” and “Evangeline” become even more magnified when one witnesses the humans behind the noise. Perry’s synthetic bass and drum flourishes are at the forefront, while his guitar seems to be permanently set to “80’s thrash metal”, to the point where minute riffs become walls of feedback and something as simple as hammering a chord becomes a monumental achievement. Their best song, “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” highlights every quality that makes this pairing so effective: Their ability to extract an infectious melody out of the most base ingredients, reference their heroes (in this case, New Order), and make it completely their own. If Bonnie and Clyde had been musicians instead of murderous bank robbers, they would have sounded something like this. Nearly every song ended with Boeckner frantically building a wall of feedback, his partner-in-crime sprawled across the stage, twisted every which way, exhausted, as if she’d been under the control of some violent spell for the previous three minutes and, through unfortunate circumstances, was being brought back to reality against her will. “This is our first time playing New Jersey,” Boeckner stated near the end of the set. “I used to collect bootleg tapes of shows at Maxwell’s, so this is something of a dream for us to be playing here.” The 200 or so in attendance couldn’t of agreed more, and when they closed with two new tracks (one of which they dedicated to the late Jay Reatard), one couldn’t but hope that they’d just hurry up and return already.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Antibalas show last Thursday at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn was catching a post-pubescent Haley Joel Osment in the crowd, wearing a duck-billed fisherman’s hat and dancing awkwardly with a bottle of Coors in his hand, struggling to keep his date from passing out completely. It’s hard to admit, but the secondhand lion unintentionally stole the show, if only because he was the most surprising aspect of the whole evening. For an act that’s been repeatedly hailed as the torch-bearing musical kin of the late great Fela Kuti, Antibalas failed to live up to their reputation as masters of the afrobeat genre Kuti himself single-handedly worked to define, and instead came off as gimmicky, predictable and, consequently, disappointing.

But maybe it’s not all their fault. After all, the band has been enjoying a recent jaunt as the backing band for Fela!, the Broadway musical famously produced by Jay-Z and Will Smith. The showmanship has certainly rubbed off on the thirteen-piece, who did play a well-rehearsed set that spanned their decade-plus run. There’s no arguing that the group has chops; they even did a solid version of Bob Marley’s “Rat Race”, replacing the original’s somber desperation with a fever-pitched groove that would make James Brown jealous. But for the most part it was obvious that Antibalas has played this show many times before, and they performed their routine with the mechanic precision of an improv team that’s been playing the same gag for the past thirty-five years: sure, they know the punch line and when to say it, but they’re no longer sure why it’s supposed to be funny. The endless call-and-response chants to the crowd, the extended solos, the uninspiring between-song banter… they all carried the stale weight of meticulous rehearsal. Which is good from a musical standpoint, but horrible if you’re going to rely on novel crowd teasers to keep people on their feet.

A magician is only as wise as his riddles are mysterious. If a band’s going to rely on parlor tricks, they’d do well to keep a variety of gimmicks on the back burner. For example, I remember being completely blown away the first time I ever saw The Flaming Lips, watching in awe as Wayne Coyne walked over the crowd in a giant bubble, blowing confetti out of a gun, and spontaneously singing happy birthday to 12,000 or so people. I also remember seeing the exact same show a year later and walking away feeling as if I’d been cheated twice. If I were to go to the next Antibalas show at the Knitting Factory — which is on New Year’s Eve for those interested — I’m positive I could tell you when each member is going to take his solo, walk along the front of the stage to shake hands with the crowd, and at the end of the show, when they say “We’re Antibalas. We are, and always will be, from Brooklyn, New York,” I’ll know it’s my cue to start chanting and raving. And, less than a month after hearing those same words at that very same place, I’m certain the effect would be even less stimulating than it was the first time around. And I’m almost certain that Haley Joel Osment wouldn’t be there.

The Kindness Kind played a brief, captivating set last Saturday at the pocket-sized Spike Hill in Williamsburg, as part of the week long CMJ Festival going on in venues and galleries throughout New York City.

The band, who has already built themselves a substantial reputation throughout their native Seattle area, drew heavily on material from their first two albums, 2007’s A Novel and last year’s self-titled follow-up. Both records feature dense, meticulously crafted work in the vein of fellow experimental pop entrepreneurs Blonde Redhead and Portishead. But where those bands have one foot firmly in the abstract side of things, The Kindness Kind prop their atmospheric arrangements within familiar pop formats, particularly on standout tracks like “On and Off Again” and the beautifully discordant single “The Lusk Letter”.

The bands’ trademark tactics – off-kilter guitars, druggy keyboard swells, stop-and-go percussion – lend an apt platform for the pointed, ethereal vocals of Allesandra Rose, who seems less bent on telling a story than conveying a general sense of uneasiness. Isolation, discordance, malaise –  all are recurring themes here, with little relent. The sound is never ugly, per se, but tracks like “New Sense” and “Houndstooth” work to create an uneasy, eerie atmosphere for the listener. This is less cocktail party than it is headphone music, though all the more rewarding for the focus it demands. The casual listener may or may not be interested, but this band is well worth checking out for those who appreciate intricate arrangements that simultaneously challenge and intrigue.

No Age have come to represent a certain lo-fi, DIY aesthetic that draws a lot of parallels with the Sonic Youth-led art-punk community of the 1980’s. Like that band, No Age are more punk in spirit than sound – behind that wall of fuzz and feedback are solid power-pop tunes a la The Thermals or, at their most melodic, Cheap Trick. The songs played here tonight pulled evenly from their two full-lengths, Weirdo Rippers and Nouns, as well as their excellent new EP, Losing Feeling. Opener “Teen Creeps” seemed a direct nod to their predominantly angst-ridden, straight edge audience, who repaid the gesture by aggressively smashing into each other and yelling random compliments (“I love your shoes, Randy!”) for the rest of the night. But you can hardly blame them for being so enthused. For two people, No Age make a lot of racket, and their minimalist setup – Dean Spunt on drums/vocals/loops, Randy Randall on guitar – lends songs like “Here Should Be My Home” and “Every Artist Needs A Tragedy” a sense of urgency largely absent from their studio counterparts. By the time they played “Boy Void,” by far their most balls-to-the-wall moment, it was clear that everyone in the audience was much more exhausted than the band was.

In contrast, instrumental tracks like “Keechie” and “Aim At The Airport” found the group exploring more textural soundscapes, employing ambient loops with walls of feedback until the two became indistinguishable. Often these instrumental breaks would lead them back the other way again, into pop territory, and the fact that they so effortlessly straddle the line between the abstract and the accessible is what makes No Age so appealing. Nouns was one of the best records of 2008, while new tracks like “You’re A Target” are so effortlessly good it makes one wonder if it really is that easy for these guys. Either way, this show was a captivating recap on an already stunning career, despite the fact that these guys have been around for less than five years.

No Age played at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York on Wednesday, October 14th.