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Pop Rock Nation

Category: Reviews

music-and-concert-reviews-you-wont-see-anywhere-else

  • David Byrne Rocks Brooklyn

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    Last night’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival opened with the groovy and unrelenting music of New Wave icon David Byrne. Byrne played a nearly-2 hour set of his material borne out of collaborations with Brian Eno, drawing from three Talking Heads albums and the albums My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and last year’s Everything that Happens will Happen Today. Byrne was on-form and his band drove the set with powerful, in-the-pocket grooves that brought the audience back to those halcyon days when the Talking Heads were a critically-acclaimed and popular band (even if some of the audience members, this one included, did not live those days). Fans dug versions of “Once in a Lifetime” and “Life During Wartime”, which were true to the original and featured, like many of the other songs, whacky antics from Byrne and his supporting cast, a mix of musicians and dances all clad in white.
    This stop in Brooklyn was part of a larger “Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno” tour that has been going on since the fall of 2008 and will continue across the US and overseas to Europe for the summer. Celebrate Brooklyn is in it’s thirtieth year and is more popular than ever – this concert featured the largest crowd in the festival’s history. Celebrate Brooklyn is rocking an awesome line up – artists diverse as John Scofield, Big Daddy Kane, Femi Kuti, Dr. Dog, MGMT and Animal Collective (the last two are benefit concerts and, therefore, not free) will grace the Prospect Park Bandshell – and ya’ll should definitely get down there to enjoy the festivities. The only piece of advice that I can share is that it is essential to get there early. Once the crowd reaches overcapacity, the gates are shut and people left out have to watch from afar, which is still neat, but not quite the same.

  • When is music not music?

    Ever since I got into “alternative music” (right after college, a LONG time ago!-ed. note, it really WAS a long time ago-), I was fascinated by, well, noise. I think it started off with James White & The Blacks, Suicide, and other NYC “noise bands” who blended “skronk” in with their songs to create a unique hybrid that sure as heck wasn’t going to get played on any commercial radio station. From there, I veered off into SPK, and I found heaven. Their first album (out of print now, I believe) used tapes of mental patients rambling, played over what sounded like people banging on giant metal springs. I loved it! Their sound started to soften with “Auto De Fe”, and they soon morphed into a dance band (?) that got signed to Elektra.

    I continued to pursue the sound of noise, getting into Merzbow, Muslim Gauze & others. I recently got a CD by Whitehouse, a noise outfit from the U.K. that tours rather irregularly. What is it about these bands that I like? Mostly, it’s that they stretch the boundries of what we call “music” to the breaking point. If there are no musical instruments being played (except maybe drums), is it music? Should it be sold in a “music store” (whatever THAT is in 2009…)? My love of music that’s NOT mainstream opened my mind to lots of great music, and the noise genre is among my favorites. I’m not always in the mood to listen to my Sonic Youth/Merzbow CD, but when I am, nothing else will do……

  • The 200-Word Review: Dave Matthews Band’s “Big Whiskey”

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    Much has been made about the spectre of loss lingering over Dave Matthews Band’s new LP “Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King”. After all, it’s the first album the band’s released since the unexpected death of sax player LeRoi Moore. Truthfully, though, DMB’s no more fixated on loss on this album than they’ve been at any other point during their career, and “Big Whiskey” is by no means a mournful set. The quartet powers through a song cycle that’s more of a celebration of life and love (and sex) than it is about death, with the only obvious nods to Moore’s passing being the sax noodling that opens and closes the album.

    With veteran rock producer Rob Cavallo taking the reins on this album, it retains a shiny gloss while sounding far dirtier than 2005’s overproduced “Stand Up”. Highlights include the wickedly upbeat “Shake Me Like a Monkey”, the uber-jammy “Alligator Pie” (with it’s wildly shifting tempos and semi-nonsense lyrics), the ominous “Time Bomb” (on which Matthews howls Eddie Vedder-style), and the sexy “Seven”, on which Matthews unleashes a playful falsetto. The album flows together nicely, and although a major part of their operation may have departed, “Big Whiskey” finds the DMB in as good a form as they’ve ever been.