Molly Templeton witnesses Les Savy Fav in Portland.

Someone gives Harrington a fork and he combs all available hair (on his own body) with it. At one point, he yelps, “What’s the difference between me and a pit bull?” The crowd responds, “Lipstick!” Harrington says, “I have human intelligence!”

Amazing.

Union Hall is around four blocks from Gorilla Coffee in Park Slope, and on nights when my supply of coffee is low and I find myself bound for the venue in question, I’ll generally make a stop beforehand for a freshly ground pack. And so on nights when I find myself standing in Union Hall’s performance space without company, as I was this evening, it leads to a strange sensation: an overpowering smell of coffee even as you drink your beer.

The show began with the usual, a pre-show mix of assorted songs-of-the-moment from the last year or so. On one of the benches lining a wall, a fellow in a blue shirt warbled along with the Dirty Projectors, his girlfriend amused or appalled. It was hard to tell whether he sang out of devotion to the group in question or ironic contempt. (Ah, Brooklyn.) The lights dimmed slowly, leaving the stage barely illuminated. That wasn’t where the first of two bands was headed, though — The Dutchess and The Duke walked to the area just in front of the stage, picked up their instruments, and began to play.

The unamplified set isn’t something you see all that often. I was towards the front of the crowd, and I suspect that Union Hall is about the largest possible venue where this could work with even those towards the back of the room having no difficulty hearing the set. In contrast with the directness I’d seen the last time I saw the group, this set was more laid-back. Though every nuance of Jesse Lortz and Kimberly Morrison’s playing was audible, the duo (along with Shayde Sartin, from Toth’s band, on percussion) occasionally laughed, dispensed “bless you”s to audience members who sneezed, and came close to cracking each other up more than once.

“I Am Just a Ghost” may have been the highlight: Lortz began the song singing just above a whisper and ended it kneeling, face pointed upwards, at a volume just below a shout. And “Scorpio”, from a seven inch on hoZac Records, may be the prettiest song the group has written to date. Throughout, with a few brief exceptions, the crowd was silent — not an easy feat to accomplish around these parts.

It might have been the contrast in styles, but when James Jackson Toth and band began to play, the roar of notes through speakers sounded huge. The last time I’d seen Toth play was a few years earlier, opening for John Vanderslice and still using the Wooden Wand alias. That set was acoustic and abundant with fire and brimstone; this set brought with it a different kind of haze. Toth’s Waiting In Vain is full of segues to paranoia, to smoke-filled rooms and uncertain memories. (It’s not far removed from The Gutter Twins’ Saturnalia — well-written, ecstatically played rock records that document aspects of life I’d rather avoid if at all possible.) The five-piece setup roared throughout the set, and with four of the five contributing vocals, the layered arrangements heard on Waiting translated to the live setting much more closely than I had expected. And while the maddeningly ecstatic “Beulah The Good” wasn’t on the evening’s set list, I left impressed.

Paper Thin Walls has called it a day. Something of a retrospective is now up.

I’ll miss it. Not only because I did a fair amount of writing for it, but because it cultivated a style of honed-in music writing that I daresay doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Plus, this was pretty damn funny.

Last week, I headed up to Lincoln Center for what turned out to be a pretty astonishing WFMU-sponsored bill. There’s a good writeup on 17 Dots that I pretty much agree with. Said writeup doesn’t go into the pretty stunning set played by The Ex and Gétatchèw Mèkurya. Essentially, it was nine musicians completely in sync with one another, moving from jazz that perfectly swung to jarring, gloriously dissonant feedback — and making it all work perfectly. (Brooklyn Vegan has some good photos as well.)

Which is, I suppose, as good a way as any to segue into linking my Experience Music Project Pop Conference presentation (“I’ve Got a Name: Music, Radical Politics, and AK Press”) from earlier this year, in which The Ex, along with AK Press, Political Asylum, and others, are discussed.

Now playing: The Gaslight Anthem’s The ‘59 Sound. This is excellent so far — knowing nostalgia in the lyrics and unrelenting rock on the musical side. Last year’s Sink or Swim sounded a bit like New Jersey’s answer to Lucero; this one shows them having found their own (’59?) sound and, hey, Springsteen nod right there. Nice.

See also: 17 Dots; Attackerman (who also points out the crucial Benny Horowitz factor).

A number of my friends make damn good food. I’ve begun doing more cooking for myself in 2008 than I ever have before; previously, the extent of my kitchen skills were limited to throwing chicken sausage in a skillet or making a passable omelet.

My current obsession, after trying them out at the apartment of one such friend of mine, are paletas. Three weeks ago, I got my blender down from the top shelf of my kitchen…and promptly realized that one part of it was cracked. Mailordered a new one; also mailordered some popsicle molds. Set out to make the first batch, based on Mark Bittman’s recipe, only to discover upon pouring the milk in that I’d assembled the components of the blender incorrectly.

Once the milk had been cleaned off the countertop, I started again. This time out, success. I have my second batch freezing as I write this, in which I’ve tried out brown sugar in lieu of the cane sugar I used the first time out. We’ll see how that goes…

The interesting thing about looking at your notes on the first draft of your novel after a span of a few months? The fact that some of them seem to make no sense whatsoever.

8. Scritti Politti were a collective.

I genuinely have no idea how this applies to this novel. (The next one is another story, perhaps.)

And sometimes my notes to myself play out like some weird stream-of-consciousness rant translated to paper.

20. Oh, wow, you totally fudged… No wait, you didn’t — Buttermilk was open by then.

It’s strangely entertaining.

My recap of a recent Elliott Gould Q & A at BAM is now up at the Tribeca Film Festival’s site, for what it’s worth.

One: In which the Paper Thin Walls editorial staff records a Deerhoof song. The publicist responses are somewhat amazing.

Two: In which Spencer Ackerman discusses Rancid, and analyzes why bands don’t typically cover songs from their members’ previous bands. (I’d like to hold up Lucero as a counter-example of this, as I saw them do a couple of killer renditions of Red 40’s “The Outsiders” at shows a few years ago.)

Three: In which Daphne Carr, recently returned stateside from Prague, argues against the Secretary of State’s comparison of Russia v. Georgia (2008) to the USSR v. Czechoslovakia (1968).

Sitting on my desk right now is School of Seven Bells‘ debut full-length, Alpinisms. It’s a promotional copy, coated with black-and-white photographs of the band, contact information for relevant parties, and information that the album will be released on October 28th of this year.

I’ve only had time to give the album an initial listen. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be pitching it anywhere or whether I’ll be writing about it in any sort of outlet, print, outline, or here. I can say, though, that my initial reaction is a good one — but then again, this album falls into the “eagerly anticipated” category for me. Just over a year ago, I reviewed their song “Wired for Light”, in the version that was posted on their Myspace page. Lately, following a lengthy conversation about contemporary music criticism with Maria Tessa Sciarrino, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I critically write about creative work, whether it be music, film, or literature.

More specifically, one of the things I’ve been trying to codify is what to use as a point of comparison when evaluating something. When I listen to a band’s song or an album, am I comparing it against that band’s earlier works? Am I looking at the previous work from the group’s members, trying to set up a historical continuum? Do I look into interviews with the band, trying to evaluate what exactly their own goals were with the recording — essentially, comparing the album with an idealized version of itself.

I don’t know whether any of these is the correct one, and I suspect I’ve relied on all of them at various points. What makes this line of debate come to mind now, however, is that several of the songs heard on Alpinisms appear in different versions elsewhere: “Wired for Light”, for instance, and also “Face to Face on High Places,” originally heard on a 12″ of the same name released by Table of the Elements.

When looking at an album such as this, how — if at all — do alternate versions of these songs affect your response? In 2006, I interviewed Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses for Copper Press. Prior to the release of their debut Everything All the Time, earlier versions of a number of its songs were available for download on their site, including a radically different version of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous “Funeral”. One quote from him (yes, it does feel strange quoting an interview I conducted, but hey…), I think, explains the issue at the heart of things:

As a music fan myself, I love those versions…. I think it’s so much more personal for people, because they get to make a choice between what it sounded like when it was originally conceived and what it evolved into over time. I really love when you have that option with bands.

Alternate versions of songs or entire albums are nothing new, from Smile to Extraordinary Machine, from Prince to Jeff Tweedy. But with outlets from Myspace to Daytrotter being more and more available for bands to debut previously unreleased songs, I do wonder whether we’ll see an increase in the number of critical takes on an album evaluating it in terms of alternative iterations of songs — and, depending on who you talk to, as that line between albums and collections of songs blurs, I suspect it’ll be a debate that will continue for some time.

Late last year, I reviewed the song “Saro” from Sam Amidon’s All Is Well. Said album, released in 2008 on Bedroom Community, is — in my opinion — one of the year’s best. Both it and Amidon’s appearances elsewhere this year have inspired a fair share of additional posts in recent months.

Amidon is currently sharing a bill — the 802 Tour — with collaborators Nico Muhly and Thomas Bartlett of Doveman. Said tour is what led to this piece in the Portland Mercury. I may post some outtakes here in the coming weeks, as there was a fair amount that I wasn’t able to incorporate into the final version.

Reading Manohla Dargis’s review of Tropic Thunder today, I found myself getting thematic echoes of the work of another acclaimed New York-based critic. The topic came in the review’s last paragraph, focusing on the character played by Tom Cruise:

What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface.

Which has me wondering: can a Manohla Dargis/Jody Rosen discussion on this theme be far off?

Curated by CounterstreamRadio.org and New Amsterdam Records.

(NPR recently spotlighted the latter on All Things Considered.)

2 PM | East River Amphitheater

itsnotyouitsme

Mark Dancigers

Timberbrit

Alex Sopp

Matt Marks and the Li’l Death Band

More information at the ERMP site or New Amsterdam’s site.

…because I read this just after I’d posted my earlier post. It’s amazing.

This, from Human Giant, is also relevant to the subject at hand, though potentially not work-safe.

I’m not sure what it says about my subconscious mind that the last genuinely vivid dream I had involved a discussion of the legal issues surrounding the new Girl Talk album. A friend and I were sitting at a bar — I’m pretty sure it was the Pencil Factory — and we talked copyright law and potential enforcement. And…that’s it. No “and then I punched a werewolf”, no “and then we realized we could fly”. Just a sightly more verbose version of a conversation I’d normally have.

I don’t know if this should worry me.