the relevant ballads

WILD FLAG

here is some information about the EXTREMELY PERSONALLY IMPORTANT ROCK CONCERT that i attended last week. it was by a band called wild flag, and it was performed at local 506 in chapel hill north carolina, my old (college) stomping grounds. i traveled a cumulative total of ~12 hours, including a shittily protracted layover, to see this band i had never actually heard. this is because sleater-kinney is my favorite band of all time always and forever, and i am so excited that janet weiss and carrie brownstein are making music together again that it was essentially a moral imperative for me to see this band as soon as i could.

my show-going companions were a good friend from middle school who i hadn’t seen in about 10 years and a friend from college who i hadn’t seen in 3 months. arguably anything would be excellent with such excellent company, but this was incredible in a way i cannot express and couldn’t anticipate at the time. the phrase that came to mind at the time was “incandescently happy” so that is what i was.

also it is a lie to say that i had not heard any of their songs, because NPR streamed “glass tambourine”,* and naturally also i had watched some youtubes from their prior shows. the point, i suppose, is that i knew this wouldn’t be a continuation of my favorite band, and yet in some ways it was better! because the first time i saw sleater-kinney i had already been a fan for nearly a decade, and some jagoff in front of me kept flashing a camera in carrie’s face and clearly stressed everyone out, and in general i had lots of Big Expectations then that i didn’t have for wild flag. also weirdly it happened that i never saw sleater-kinney in a venue i was familiar with; seeing wild flag on that stage, a stage i’ve been on to sing terrible karaoke, in a venue i’ve been to many dozens of times, was a whole cocktail of emotions (largely extremely joyous) about my relationship to live music and to my college town, which i won’t go into further, because EMOTIONS ARE BORING; ROCK MUSIC IS AWESOME (to reappropriate ryan north). although i will say that their stage banter about college basketball was pretty enjoyable. i was really delighted, too, to recognize both jon wurster and john darnielle in the audience, but i did not talk to them, because i do not like imposing on some dudes’ conversations to tell them i like their bands and their twitter accounts; that is probably a dick move, BUT ALSO BECAUSE:

as i was leaving the show, janet weiss was sitting at the merch table, so i borrowed some dude’s half-dead sharpie and got her to autograph my copy of the wild flag 7”, and told her that she is basically my favorite drummer ever, and thanked her for making music, to which she said “my pleasure.”

so this is my terrible telephone picture, taken while i was still kind of trembling with glee, of my new important piece of music memorabilia. this is going up there with my copy of “a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again” in the notional sack of things i would save from a burning building.

*also anyone that would vote to defund an organization that makes this amazing music available is clearly an actual moron who has never experienced fun. that is my political sidenote. NPR is also streaming their dang SXSW set, in which carrie is wearing the same shirt she wore in chapel hill.

my sister pointed out that i haven’t updated this shit in an age.

thank you, sister. i love you.

it is a true fact that i have not updated this or any other internet shit (aside from twitter or a saucily named beer blog) in a dang while. i had some grandiose notions of making a big ol’ best of 2010 list and stuff, but then i realized that actually i do not give many fucks about many records that people don’t already know are awesome from last year. EXCEPTION: desert fires by noveller. get that album if you like grouper (i like grouper a lot) and also relaxing with distorted chimey guitar noises and thick haze-sounds (i like this also). instead, while i am procrastinating on writing some other stuff, allow me to list some recent impulse purchases i made in record stores!

-the slits, in the beginning (picture disc): despite a devotion to riot grrl that has now spanned more than half my life, i did not listen closely to the slits until after ari up died, which i would be ashamed of if i still thought there was any use for cultural-literacy shame (i don’t). holy shit you guys. the joy and abandon in this performance kind of motivates me in life.

-anthony shake shakir, frictionalism 1994-2009: house music! techno music! i am bad at drawing the line, especially for something that is just so powerfully funky as to defy any descriptions that do not involve booty-shaking. my extremely techno-aware ex-roommate has also informed me that anthony shakir is a really nice dude in person, which i am very pleased to know.

-marnie stern, marnie stern: some of my friends were saying that her songwriting got way better on this album and i can see where they’re coming from, although if i wake up with a marnie stern song stuck in my head it’s usually still “shea stadium” for whatever reason. (catchiness, to me, is often a mark of good songwriting.) she’s just great at shredding some shit up and that is really essential sometimes.

(side note on marnie stern and also music criticism: i was deeply annoyed about sasha frere-jones’s description of her “finger-tapping technique associated with male players like Eddie Van Halen,” because what the fuck does eddie van halen’s gender tell anyone about the way his guitar sounds. that is some true actual bullshit, and if the bro who wrote it is following his tumblr trackbacks will he please explain himself? that is the most i am going to do to try and stalk the new yorker’s pop music critic into seeing the error of his ways or whatever, but seriously, wtf, as the kids say) !?

two albums this year that are exactly as awesome as i expected

-the new kylesa album, spiral shadow
-the new superchunk album, majesty shredding (could also be an accurate alternate title for the new kylesa album)

I RETURNED TO THE INTERNET to SAY MORE STUFF ABOUT NO AGE

i wrote about this band before, and they remain delightful! and now there is photographic evidence on the internet of when i met randy randall from no age. he was incredibly kind and gracious and i was basically a total goober. i am still happy about this thing, although i realized on my bike ride home that i am also sort of mad that i don’t live in a shitty artist loft space, and instead live in a shitty studio apartment, because if i lived in a shitty loft i would have invited no age to play a show there, and it would’ve been a far superior venue than the pritzker pavilion for how they sound.

the pitchfork festival always happens over my birthday

last year my long-shot birthday request was for yo la tengo to play “last days of disco.” they did not play it at the festival, but they did write me a very nice email, and then they did play it when they came back in the fall. this year my long-shot birthday requests are so long-shot that i am not actually emailing anyone about them. they are:

“do you want new wave or do you want the truth?” is one of the most perfect songs

that’s all.

and: if it didn’t mean that no one would actually see this i would backdate it to be posted on 5/5/10, which was double nickels on the dime day, of course.

important fact about the new joanna newsom song

they are streaming it at drag city’s site! THE IMPORTANT FACT IS that it starts out EXACTLY THE SAME as “gum chimes” by max tundra.

REAL TALK, Y’ALL

the thing about fever ray

as noted before, karin dreijer andersson made my favorite album of 2009, and probably also my favorite show of 2009, and since i am never going to get more articulate about this than i am right this moment (or, rather, than i felt approximately 10 minutes ago while i was doing the dishes, listening to the knife’s opera about darwin, and contemplating how much karin dreijer is my heroine), it is time that i take some moments to yell into the ether about it.

one of the things i learned in the course of my english majordom was about performative speech: in english, the main example i can think of is “with this ring, i thee wed.” once it’s said, a transformation takes place. in the metro, in the dark, with fog machines spitting unrelentingly, the reverberating bass of “if i had a heart” felt like a performance in that sense. it was so loud and strange (it went on far longer than it does on the album) and unignorable. without that music, a woman dressing up like a skull or a haggard tree-nymph or a melty-faced ghoul is just a gimmick. with it, it’s more like magic. it’s the only time in recent memory that i have been frightened and awed by music. the show was literally dark, and the music is figuratively so; it’s disquieting like things that scared you as a kid, revisited when you’re not quite grown.

the thing about the performative voice is that there are so few opportunities to use it; there are no magic spells, no binding words that can’t be backspaced or undone. and the thing about that performance, and that album, is that they manage to make disguises and spells seem new and worth believing in. her voice changes and multiplies, and, in my favorite album track, “keep the streets empty” is a chant like something from a fairy tale. i picture my own deserted street in chicago at night vividly, preserving that emptiness, walking through it untouched. being frightened by music, without critical intercessions or ironic remove, seems a way to be braver against the horrifying stuff of dreams and the dull stuff of the ordinary day. it is important and potent and beautiful. it takes some getting used to, but then it’s love.

i’m a bonerfied nincompoop for not having listened to jay reatard before he died.

also i’m really insecure about not knowing how to pronounce his name. is it just “retard” or is that extra “a” its own syllable?