Standing stock-still on stage in finely-cut black suit, a statue of steadfast rock cool, Elvis Costello stared down the crowd through his black shades. Having just finished a mighty and vicious “Radio, Radio”—his fifth encore—he seemed to be saying, “Come on bitches, I dare you to dare me to blow your mind yet again, cuz I’ll do it.”
Of course we took the bait and feverishly rooted him on to a frenzied “The Imposter” and six more encore songs.
Costello’s reputation as a guy more interested in Tin Pan Alley-tinged adult pop collaborations than rock ‘n’ roll—he’s approaching Santana’s rate of collaborations; although none of his suck ass as bad as Santana’s—was erased as he and the Imposters (Attraction keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas with new bassist Davey Faragher) spent 100-minutes tearing though the songwriter’s back pages.
The show was an Elvis-ophile’s dream. Missing that old-guy paunch but breaking a sweat early, Costello opened with “Welcome to the Working Week”—the first cut off his first album—and played as if he was getting paid by the song through ten tracks in 40-minutes including “Lover’s Walk,” “Clubland” and “Beyond Belief.”
At first it seemed Costello’s sweat-beaded brow indicated inevitable exhaustion, instead he was like a tip-top athlete whose perspiration proves he’s just warming up. The first ten songs—none of which were hits—were just prelude to a four-song main set finale and a 12-song encore that just kept going.
“Alibi Factory” elevated the show to transcendence. Costello sung the great tell-off with a mix of vitriol and good humor in front of his unexpected, avant guard guitar licks and Nieve’s violent Theremin and keyboard blips and bleeps. From there he pushed the band into a risky, rewarding space with a chaotic, complex “Watching the Detectives” and a youthful, punchy “Lipstick Vogue” to close the main set.
After thirty seconds offstage Costello returned for the big, organ-propelled ballad “A Man Out of Time” and version of “(I don’t want to go to) Chelsea” that seemed to both lag and rush—one of the show’s only disappointments, the snarl the band approached the song with in ’78 was missed. Costello quickly recovered with “Uncomplicated” and the stare-down-the-crowd fierceness of “Radio, Radio” and “The Impostor.”
For his second encore Costello returned with only an acoustic guitar to do a version of “Alison” twisted enough to thwart would-be singers looking for the originally melody. The show climaxed at a fever pitch with “Pump It Up” and “(What’s so funny ’bout) Peace, Love & Understand” with the added lyrics “Bring the boys back home/Bring ’em back alive.”
Costello will likely team with Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet or some other adult talent on his next project, but it kicked so much ass to see he’s still got that juvenile rock kid in him. Let’s hope the snotty, cool tike kicks and claws and bites his way free from Costello’s debonair maturity more often.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
People often ask me how I make such bad grammier and make me living writting word and stuff
One of my former editors pointed out: "Microsoft Word, by the way, is not a 'who.' At least not yet." While totally true, my subhead would be totally emasculated if wrote: "Those that think I’m too late to get on the blog train should note that I’m ahead of the guys who write the code for Microsoft Word who don't yet know that 'blog' is a word.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Last best show: Arcade Fire - 5/10/07 - Orpheum, Boston
Rock shows so rarely make me feel like I'm watching a “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
It’s probably because so few rock shows have someone with Arcade Fire frontman Win Bulter’s gravitas doing a damn convincing Captain Nemo-going-down-with-the-sub impersonation looming over a 10-piece band and playing a 12-foot-tall pipe organ bathed in a ghoulishly-dim red light.
Not every moment of the Arcade Fire’s sold-out show was as creepy as Bulter singing “I’m standing on a stage/Of fear and self-doubt/It’s a hollow play/But they'll clap anyway” and playing his gargantuan pipe organ. But they were all nearly as cool and compelling.
The band mounted a stage show more intricate than anything I’ve seen in months – if not years. Slender rods spread around the stage pulsed red, an IMAX-sized backdrop broadcast abstract film clips, and five circular video screens above the band on poles flashed images of the band through fish-eyed lenses or neon bibles with fluttering pages or choreographed snow and static. And everything was suffused in a crimson glow.
Reinforcing the chaos, the Arcade Fire looked (and kind of acted) like mob of gothic bookstore employees and cabaret cocktail waitresses who got blitzed on absinth and raided a Prague polka music shop. Traditional rock instruments mixed with French horns, violins, accordions, glockenspiels and many more to oddly rock-out on “Black Mirror,” “No Cars Go,” single “Keep the Car Running” and the especially sweaty and undulating “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).”
While the band did manage to rein in the pandemonium for a few songs – the restrained “Ocean of Noise” and the moody encore lullaby “Neon Bible” – more often they were totally unhinged swapping instruments, shouting wordlessly at us (us shouted back) and banging on random drums and cymbals while writhing on the stage floor or jumping into the crowd.
And it was great to see. So few arty bands are this rowdy or visceral or, well, good when playing live.
It’s probably because so few rock shows have someone with Arcade Fire frontman Win Bulter’s gravitas doing a damn convincing Captain Nemo-going-down-with-the-sub impersonation looming over a 10-piece band and playing a 12-foot-tall pipe organ bathed in a ghoulishly-dim red light.
Not every moment of the Arcade Fire’s sold-out show was as creepy as Bulter singing “I’m standing on a stage/Of fear and self-doubt/It’s a hollow play/But they'll clap anyway” and playing his gargantuan pipe organ. But they were all nearly as cool and compelling.
The band mounted a stage show more intricate than anything I’ve seen in months – if not years. Slender rods spread around the stage pulsed red, an IMAX-sized backdrop broadcast abstract film clips, and five circular video screens above the band on poles flashed images of the band through fish-eyed lenses or neon bibles with fluttering pages or choreographed snow and static. And everything was suffused in a crimson glow.
Reinforcing the chaos, the Arcade Fire looked (and kind of acted) like mob of gothic bookstore employees and cabaret cocktail waitresses who got blitzed on absinth and raided a Prague polka music shop. Traditional rock instruments mixed with French horns, violins, accordions, glockenspiels and many more to oddly rock-out on “Black Mirror,” “No Cars Go,” single “Keep the Car Running” and the especially sweaty and undulating “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).”
While the band did manage to rein in the pandemonium for a few songs – the restrained “Ocean of Noise” and the moody encore lullaby “Neon Bible” – more often they were totally unhinged swapping instruments, shouting wordlessly at us (us shouted back) and banging on random drums and cymbals while writhing on the stage floor or jumping into the crowd.
And it was great to see. So few arty bands are this rowdy or visceral or, well, good when playing live.
This week's album: Maximo Park - "Our Earthly Pleasures"
Like a lot of Brits, Maximo Park makes pop that’s doubles as art. The follow-up to the band’s debut “A Certain Trigger,” “Pleasures” has the same dance-y feel as good New Order, but it's not nearly as skeletal. Like pals Field Music (whose "Tones of Town" is top ten of the year), Maximo Park cultivate club beats into fully-bloomed songs as lively and lush as a Beatles or Queen cut. “Our Velocity” is a massive U.K. radio hit, but its album opener “Girls Who Play Guitars” that may be this year’s best pop single. It's so friggin' good. Expect it to open my next mix.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Sweet-Ass Band Alert!: Witch's Hat
Imagine if Rush pulled the sticks out of their asses and just tried to write some KISS shit. Imagine Judas Priest kids in a Ween world. Imagine Tolkien and Freddie Mercury collaborating on the next AC/DC record. Imagine all the people living in fucked up rock harmony. Favorite lyric from new CD “Mastery of the Steel”: “Are you male, are you female? Are you maybe an alien from a spaceship sent to teach me how to love?”
Friday, March 30, 2007
The Bad Plus are a jazz trio
When your roommate asks you what you’re doing on your way to the Bad Plus, you’ll have to say, “I’m going to see a jazz trio.” You’ll probably mislead your roommate into thinking you dig shit like Kenny G, Michael Bublé or Pat Metheny. But what else can you say?
The Bad Plus don’t sing, they’re all about improvisation and they play traditional jazz instruments (piano, upright bass and drum kit). They’re jazz. Even if drummer Dave King is loath call himself a jazz drummer.
“I want to protect myself ascetically because I don’t want people to picture me playing at a Sheraton hotel,” King told me. “It’s like what they say, ‘A million cocktail musicians have destroyed what a few geniuses created.’”
The trio’s doesn’t swing or bop, but it’s also not Phishy or (too) reminiscent of Medeski, Martin & Wood. King and bassist Reid Anderson grew up listening to classic rock (pianist Ethan Iverson we’ll get to later, that guy's a friggin' nut), but there’s no fusion rock feel to the Bad Plus.
Instead, like experimentalists Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, the Bad Plus create new music (which we still gotta call jazz, because, as previously mentioned, what the fuck else can we call it).
“We truly feel like we’re the most honest jazz group out there because we’re not pretending to be Miles Davis,” says King. “We’re playing from the truest part of ourselves. When you hear us you can feel that we’re dedicated to it. I would question whether you can feel the same thing when you hear Wynton Marsalis play.
“You can hear that he loves jazz, but can you hear another motive too? Is he doing it to steer peoples’ opinions about what jazz is and what jazz isn’t? His playing just seems loaded with all this other bullshit.”
And here’s where the diatribe begins. Like some kind of jazz Robert Moses, Marsalis has spent his career reconstructing the music’s history to fit his vision, which starts with Dixieland and ends with Kind of Blue. Meanwhile, King has spent his career pissing on Marsalis’ reconstruction.
“The irony is that we all grew up loving those early Wynton records,” he says - and he's right to say it, the early Wynton records are as good as Davis in 1963. “But that was before he made ten billion dollars trying to steer the entire jazz education program to his direction and became a zealot who wouldn’t let anything new in…But you know when Wynton is all alone in his apartment he’s cranking up Led Zeppelin. I’ll guarantee it. You don’t think his drummer Jeff Watts loves John Bonham? You put on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and Watts is going ape shit. But can he tell Wynton he digs it, or that he digs Radiohead, and keep his gig? I don’t know.”
While King thinks the new traditionalists attempt to keep jazz pure is moronic, he and his band have been accused using jazz’s oldest gimmick -- covering rock tunes -- to draw in listeners. On every one of their albums there’s a cover that could be considered a pander or ironic or both, including “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart of Glass,” “Iron Man” and “Chariots of Fire.”
King says the covers aren’t jokes. Jazz is about taking on standards, but the Bad Plus don’t see a point in doing the hundredth version of “Straight, No Chaser.” So they starting doing rock tunes with worthy melodies -- or tunes that confounded pianist Ethan Iverson (now more on the group's friggin' nuts-o).
“Ethan’s a different kind of guy,” says King. “He listened to Art Tatum religiously when he was 13-years-old, he wrote a tune called ‘Modern’ in fifth grade, he wore a suit to school from second grade until he graduated from high school.”
When the trio first began playing together, King and bassist Reid Anderson began brainstorming rock tunes to cover. When Iverson revealed he’d never heard the Who, the two began digging into Iverson’s rock ignorance.
“Jokingly we suggested Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and he asked, ‘Who is that?” says King. “We knew we had to do it because we knew Ethan would approach the song the same way he’d approach Stravinsky.”
Since recording “Teen Spirit,” the band’s tastes (and ambition) have expanded. It probably pisses off Wynton but earlier this year they did six-night stint at jazz’s most legendary venue, the Village Vanguard. Last month they performed a seven-movement score with the Mark Morris Modern Dance Group. This week they’re releasing their new album produced by Tony Platt (who ran the boards for tons of rock records including Back in Black, Foreigner’s 4 and albums by Iron Maiden, Cheap Trick and Motorhead).
“If you get past the press blurb about how we play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and you actually check out what we’re doing you’ll see we’re true to it,” says King. “We’re interested in improvised music that has no stylist boundaries so we’re going to confuse people that want to hold on to boundaries.”
In other words, they’re a jazz trio.
The Bad Plus don’t sing, they’re all about improvisation and they play traditional jazz instruments (piano, upright bass and drum kit). They’re jazz. Even if drummer Dave King is loath call himself a jazz drummer.
“I want to protect myself ascetically because I don’t want people to picture me playing at a Sheraton hotel,” King told me. “It’s like what they say, ‘A million cocktail musicians have destroyed what a few geniuses created.’”
The trio’s doesn’t swing or bop, but it’s also not Phishy or (too) reminiscent of Medeski, Martin & Wood. King and bassist Reid Anderson grew up listening to classic rock (pianist Ethan Iverson we’ll get to later, that guy's a friggin' nut), but there’s no fusion rock feel to the Bad Plus.
Instead, like experimentalists Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, the Bad Plus create new music (which we still gotta call jazz, because, as previously mentioned, what the fuck else can we call it).
“We truly feel like we’re the most honest jazz group out there because we’re not pretending to be Miles Davis,” says King. “We’re playing from the truest part of ourselves. When you hear us you can feel that we’re dedicated to it. I would question whether you can feel the same thing when you hear Wynton Marsalis play.
“You can hear that he loves jazz, but can you hear another motive too? Is he doing it to steer peoples’ opinions about what jazz is and what jazz isn’t? His playing just seems loaded with all this other bullshit.”
And here’s where the diatribe begins. Like some kind of jazz Robert Moses, Marsalis has spent his career reconstructing the music’s history to fit his vision, which starts with Dixieland and ends with Kind of Blue. Meanwhile, King has spent his career pissing on Marsalis’ reconstruction.
“The irony is that we all grew up loving those early Wynton records,” he says - and he's right to say it, the early Wynton records are as good as Davis in 1963. “But that was before he made ten billion dollars trying to steer the entire jazz education program to his direction and became a zealot who wouldn’t let anything new in…But you know when Wynton is all alone in his apartment he’s cranking up Led Zeppelin. I’ll guarantee it. You don’t think his drummer Jeff Watts loves John Bonham? You put on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and Watts is going ape shit. But can he tell Wynton he digs it, or that he digs Radiohead, and keep his gig? I don’t know.”
While King thinks the new traditionalists attempt to keep jazz pure is moronic, he and his band have been accused using jazz’s oldest gimmick -- covering rock tunes -- to draw in listeners. On every one of their albums there’s a cover that could be considered a pander or ironic or both, including “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart of Glass,” “Iron Man” and “Chariots of Fire.”
King says the covers aren’t jokes. Jazz is about taking on standards, but the Bad Plus don’t see a point in doing the hundredth version of “Straight, No Chaser.” So they starting doing rock tunes with worthy melodies -- or tunes that confounded pianist Ethan Iverson (now more on the group's friggin' nuts-o).
“Ethan’s a different kind of guy,” says King. “He listened to Art Tatum religiously when he was 13-years-old, he wrote a tune called ‘Modern’ in fifth grade, he wore a suit to school from second grade until he graduated from high school.”
When the trio first began playing together, King and bassist Reid Anderson began brainstorming rock tunes to cover. When Iverson revealed he’d never heard the Who, the two began digging into Iverson’s rock ignorance.
“Jokingly we suggested Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and he asked, ‘Who is that?” says King. “We knew we had to do it because we knew Ethan would approach the song the same way he’d approach Stravinsky.”
Since recording “Teen Spirit,” the band’s tastes (and ambition) have expanded. It probably pisses off Wynton but earlier this year they did six-night stint at jazz’s most legendary venue, the Village Vanguard. Last month they performed a seven-movement score with the Mark Morris Modern Dance Group. This week they’re releasing their new album produced by Tony Platt (who ran the boards for tons of rock records including Back in Black, Foreigner’s 4 and albums by Iron Maiden, Cheap Trick and Motorhead).
“If you get past the press blurb about how we play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and you actually check out what we’re doing you’ll see we’re true to it,” says King. “We’re interested in improvised music that has no stylist boundaries so we’re going to confuse people that want to hold on to boundaries.”
In other words, they’re a jazz trio.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
This week's album: Kings of Leon - "Because of the Times"
Imagine if a sedated Iggy Pop fronting a 1986-era U2 recorded a Keith Richards-produced, Paul Westerberg-rewritten “Radar Love” and you’ll begin to approach the sheer awesomeness of Kings third album-opener “Knocked Up.” And that’s just the first seven minutes. A single sub-par tune (“McFearless”) taints the album, for the rest of the record the red zone-driven needle bounces between Replacements “Let It Be” great and Stones’ “Let It Bleed” brilliant. Maybe no album before has managed to come up with such a natural blend of punk, metal, new wave, garage, psychedelica and Americana.
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