Stopped by the AAM day party on Saturday. Spent some time catching up with old friends who were in town for the festival; caught a little of Oh No! Oh My!’s set, which was not bad at all. The first full set I took in was from Islands; a fair amount of new songs were played, with a handful of Return to the Sea numbers also making appearances. They pulled off the shift into indie hip-hop that occurs at the end of “Where There’s a Will There’s a Whalebone” (with guest appearances); overall, a well-played, wide-ranging set.
Anna Ternheim was up next, playing guitar and piano with occasional pre-recorded beats emanating from the speakers around her. Hailing from Stockholm, I’ve been giving her self-titled EP a fair amount of listening time lately; it’s a compilation of songs from her previous, unavailable-in-the-US albums. She pulls off a mean cover of “China Girl”, and has the sort of soothing yet barbed voice that works perfectly with her lyrical themes of dysfunctional relationships and obsession.
Will Sheff took the stage next, playing mainly songs from his band Okkervil River‘s recent The Stage Names. It was a strange set at times: Sheff’s vocal approach could be described as agitated, while his instincts musically were to open the songs up and let them sprawl, and there were some inherent contradictions in this approach. This was apparent from the start, as he opened with “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe” — which admittedly has its fair share of stops and starts; as SB points out, it’s a song that pushes for a massive scale yet constantly subverts that. It wasn’t the “Hey, cool! Stripped-down versions of Okkervil River songs!” that one might have expected — but that’s not a bad thing.
Headed from there to the Bowery Ballroom for the Sub Pop showcase. Le Loup took the stage first, and…well, I think you may have my favorite set from the festival right here. When I saw them on Tuesday, I’d said that their live sound was vastly different from their album; this was especially the case here. They opened with “Canto XXXVI”, the penultimate song heard on The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly; it opened slowly, building more and more; “we will lift her up; we will lift her body up” drifting over the microphone, and then, not long afterwards, the drop: they sang “skies will open up” and you damn well believed they could. And that was how the set opened.
What else to say? Three guitarists, all pulling off heroic moves; lead Loup Sam Simkoff at times flailing into the microphone, a banjo hanging from his back. (Diana Wong has some photos of their Knitting Factory show here.)Â “I Had a Dream I Died.” closed the set, and again: the force of nearly everyone in the band on vocals was amazing.
Foals were up next: catchy, visceral, dancy post-punk. (The first Futureheads album meets Underworld, maybe?) Next up were the Brunettes; when I saw them in 2006, I had a fine time at their show but wanted a little more from their recent album Mars Loves Venus. A year and a half later, and their new disc Structure & Cosmetics is out and is, in fact, a much deeper, more nuanced work than their last. The downside? These songs didn’t translate nearly as well to the live setting: it was a solid set but not an inspiring one.
Last up were Band of Horses. This is the fourth tour I’ve seen them on. The initial lineup, heard at 2006′s SXSW, made me a believer, while the four-piece version I saw later last year at Warsaw was still solid, but not quite up to the heights of that initial impression. Since then, the band has relocated to South Carolina; I saw them at McCarren Pool over the summer and liked what I heard. And this show was flat-out terrific: at his best, Ben Bridwell can summon up a hard-fought optimism that’s contagious, and his enthusiasm onstage was likewise infectious. When the singer of a rock band asks the crowd, “How’re you doing?”, the accepted rock-crowd response is to cheer; the way Bridwell says it, you’re left thinking that, no, the guy actually wants to know how all six hundred of us are doing. It made for a fine way to bring the night to a close.