The Bird and the Bee – Please Clap Your Hands (Blue Note Records)
A quick follow up to their self-titled debut LP, The Bird and the Bee’s five-song EP, Please Clap Your Hands, is a charming, sometimes surprisingly potent effort. While making no bones in their attempt to be the coolest musicians you listen to today, singer Inara George – as alluring as she is bound to be disinterested in me – and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin escape ridicule because they are that cool. Recorded in Los Angeles and “some hotel room in Amsterdam,” the EP has the sound of a spy movie about it. Why “some hotel room”? Why Amsterdam? Are they on the run? And from who? The lyrics engage and interest but don’t push the allusion. Anyway, I long for them to be in French, that they might transcend the duo’s sound one push further and suddenly become a renegade sountrack to Cleo From 5 to 7 or A Woman is a Woman. Cigarette smoke everywhere.
Read full work »
In the eager attentiveness of the first few weeks after its release, a friend commented that Animal Collective’s LP, Strawberry Jam, sounded “tribal. The rhythms and vocal shenanigans.” “It sounds like childhood,” I said. “But it’s also terrifying,” he said. “Like childhood.”
In trying to describe Victorious to a friend, I stuttered a moment before admitting, “It’s like it doesn’t exist. The omnipresence of the Perishers’ mild pop sound causes it to seem like it doesn’t exist.” I even remembered the difference between omnipresence and omniscience with only a brief, unnoticeable pause.
It was Sunday night in Buffalo so no one was getting drunk before or during the October 14th Architecture in Helsinki show at the Tralf. There were pitchers and plastic cocktail cups all around, to be sure, but nothing that could induce an almost entirely white audience to dance with nary an inhibition, as Architecture’s sound itself may prompt one to do. Taking stage, bandleader Cameron Bird saying of the band’s first experience with a TGIFriday’s restaurant (it was across the street), “I know now what you [people] are about,” AiH sounded, as a couple fellow carpoolers prompted, Australian.
When the three male members of Phosphorescent took stage at midnight on Wednesday October 10 at the Bug Jar in Rochester, NY many patrons who had toe-tapped and finger-snapped to Peter and the Wolf’s woozy set had gone off to bed and Conan, and the smack of billiards and crash of glasses in the bar in the next room were subtle and, however unintentional, complimentary to the band’s delicate performance. Vocalist/guitarist Matthew Houck sang his lonely, abandoned melodies through a mass of red beard and atop the keyboardist and the bassist/drummer who (names are sometimes hard to come by at late shows in the Flour City) often did both at once. The band’s sound throughout was as though they were forever performing a dirge that trembles and shifts but never explodes.
The world of We Belong to the Staggering Evening, the Ike Reilly Assassination’s sixth release, like the best (or at least my favorite) works largely about being or being around low down beat down (to steal from Kerouac) drunk and somewhat wild people in which the protagonist surely does not want to be there, I want to be there. At the fish plant uprising in the song of that name, or listening to the train (“I Hear the Train”) with Ike and the minister, or at the border town in “Valentine’s Day in Juarez.” The last the most openly Dylan of the twelve songs presented, jangles with an acoustic guitar and rustic piano reminiscent of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (Highway 61 Revisited) that Dylan tune which begins, “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And it’s Eastertime, too.”