Streets of Your Town: This week's concerts, with A$AP Rocky, Thurston Moore, Björk and more
A$AP Rocky.
12:26 pm Jan. 30, 2012
Now that the Internet has rendered the notion of obscure records more or less obsolete, every genre is home to multiple personalities.
Jazz swings from confrontational skronk to soothing supper club, hip-hop from lurid horrorcore to firebrand actvism, and folk music from witchy mysticism to earnest storytelling.
Laura Gibson (Jan. 30, Mercury Lounge) is one of the best examples of the former. Her just-released album Le Grande feels like it's being piped into the vestibule of a deserted hotel sometime in the 1930s, her creaky, mischievous voice curling curiously around plucked guitar and ghostlike lap steel. The album opens with Gibson imagining midnight moonlight spilling through a forest and ends with her being taught "how to die again" over a groaning standup bass. In between are bloody moons and dark visions and broken hearts, but its most arresting moment comes halfway through. "The Rushing Dark," lays Gibson's voice, cooing as ominously as a choir girl with a Ouija board, over what sounds like a dull needle scraping dusty vinyl. It’s like an eerie message from the other side, one you'd be foolish to dismiss.
If Gibson is nodding back toward the haunting desperation of '30s folk and country artists like the Carter Family, the songs of the U.K. band Dry the River (Jan. 30, Glasslands) were born a few decades later. They begin from the same warm strumming and stacked harmonies favored by folkies like Pentangle or, more recently, Mumford and Sons, but from there, they steadily build to a kind of ignition point, a moment where the brittle tinder of acoustic guitar is set ablaze and roars furiously to life The crescendo that comes halfway through "Weights & Measure" rushes in like an epiphany, vocalist Pete Liddle's anguished tenor vaulting desperately over the churning ocean of guitar. Their live shows are exercises in the same calculated intensity, working to a series of deafening, cathartic moments before collapsing, spent but relieved.
The Brooklyn band Eula (Jan. 31, Brooklyn Bowl) is less interested in catharsis than direct attack. They take the herky-jerky guitars of post-punk pioneers like Gang of Four and Wire and submerge them in muck so they're filthy and almost prehistoric. If their predecessor's songs were right angles, Eula's are rude elbows. They lurch forward like a drunk looking for a fight, the pitch black low-end contrasting with the cherry-candy sweetness of Alyse Lamb's voice. Hers is the sweet smile that masks a dark heart.
Ditto for Julie Christmas (Feb. 4, St. Vitus) In 2010, the vocalist for the Brooklyn band Made Out of Babies released her first solo record, the harrowing horror story The Bad Wife, on which she shrieked and bellowed and raged about evil men and violent urges against collapsing walls of guitar. It was a masterpiece that succeeded in large part because of Christmas's inability, even amid all that din, to hold back. Her voice goes from operatic bellow to feral shriek, a blunt, chilling instrument that carves up the meat of her songs like a hot blade on skin. There is a thrilling violence to her music—her songs feel constantly ready to pounce without warning. Even her tenderest refrain is just a half-second away from that blood-curdling howl.
The band Abigail Williams (Jan. 30, St. Vitus) takes a shorter route to a full-body bruising. The Arizona group—named, somewhat counter-intuitively, for one of the plaintiffs in the Salem Witch Trials—takes a symphonic approach to black metal, leavening that genre's blunt brutality with long, lyrical passages that ratchet up the drama. Their guitars beat as fast as a hummingbird's wings, and the tense melody lines that emerge can be hypnotizing. "Radiance," from their forthcoming Becoming, is practically heartbreaking, a guitar line plummeting again and again as thick riffs chop angrily beneath. It's like black waves batting down a dying gull.
These days, electronic music operates within the same expansive sonic range as metal. Case in point: Skrillex (Jan. 31, Webster Hall), the producer who surged to towering global success (and netted a clutch of Grammy nominations) by making dance music that operates by rock music principles. Known to his parents as Sonny John Moore, Skrillex takes the raw materials of the dour U.K.-originated genre dubstep—ghost-in-the-machine vocals, chest-walloping bass drops—speeds the tempo and gussies them up in hot pink, laserlike synths. In Skrillex songs, all elements are competing for dominance—buzzsaw keyboards go neck-and-neck with bug-eyed digital screeches and percussion that booms and ricochets like a room full of nuclear handballs. Some genre purists have raised hackles about Moore's credibility—he began his music career as a member of the bleeding-heart emo group From First to Last, and his fairly recent decision to leap across to electronic music does bear the faintest whiff of carpetbagging. In truth, he hasn't changed all that much. There's a visceral kick to Skrillex's music that isn't too far from the surge and swipe of hardcore. All he really did was swap instruments.
The Portland group Blouse (Jan. 31, 285 Kent) also has a thing for synthesizers, but their approach is more sedate. Despite the fact that they share a song title with hyperactive poptronica pioneers the Prodigy (to whom Skrillex probably bears the closest aesthetic resemblance), Blouse's "Firestarter" is a moody, maudlin number, one where synths trickle down slowly, like rain on a window. On songs like "Time Travel," vocalist Charlie Hilton leads her beleaguered alto among the same tense guitars and funereal keyboards that characterized early Cure records like Pornography. If Skrillex is the sound of going down in flames, Blouse are the drowsy, supernatural dance party that happens in purgatory just afterward.
And then there are those bands who take the same raw materials, but end up using them to build very different things. Widowspeak (Feb 4, Big Snow), Hospitality (Feb, 3, Glasslands) and Bleached (Jan. 31, Webster Hall) all employ spindly guitars, airy production and wispy female vocals but, lined up side by side, their songs form a kind of personality spectrum. Widowspeak is at the shadowy end—their music is drowsy and moves slowly, Molly Hamilton's voice having the same purplish hue as Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval. Hospitality, the giddy New York group led by Amber Papini, is noticeably brighter. The songs on their just-released debut are bright and freewheeling, marrying the self-conscious bookishness of Belle & Sebastian with a childlike sense of wonder. A lot of that has to do with Papini's voice; alternately yelping and cooing, she sounds like she exists in a constant state of discovery. Every song sounds like she's tearing open a new present and is overjoyed by what she finds behind the paper. Bleached, comprised of the sisters Jennifer and Jessie Clavin, who were once members of the rambunctious group Mika Miko, are more ramshackle still, barreling through rickety two-minute punk songs like they're about to be thrown out of the club.
It’s just a fact of life that genres today bleed together, like figures in a runny watercolor. To listen to LiveLoveRocky, the full-length from the 23-year-old rapper A$AP Rocky, (Feb. 1, Irving Plaza) is to hear this happening in real time. Harlem native Rocky has a wry, crackling flow—like Lil Wayne, but less groggy—but he's rat-a-tatting over woozy productions that, if his voice were removed, would sidle up nicely alongside the woozy electronic music called chillwave. It's the contrast that makes the album work; Rocky is a confident, nimble rapper, but hearing his bravado punching against such eerie, filmy backing tracks makes for a disorienting experience; it's the same disregard for genre that had Afrika Bambaataa rapping over Kraftwerk in the '80s. After a few years of troubling stagnation, Rocky seems to be pointing toward a fascinating way forward. The people at RCA Records agree—they signed Rocky to a $3 million contract. Whether his delirious concoction can connect with a larger audience is the only hurdle that remains to be cleared.
Better, then, to operate outside genre altogether—lessons Thurston Moore (Feb. 3, Maxwell's) and Nicolas Jaar (Feb. 3, Music Hall of Williamsburg) are expert at teaching. Both with Sonic Youth and in his solo work, Moore has instilled traditional pop structures with stubborn experimental impulses, strangling a beautiful melody with a rude tangle of guitar, or grafting free-jazz atonalism into punk rock. His recent solo record, Demolished Thoughts, is decidedly more polite, full of hushed chamber folk that, coming from such a notorious noise addict, are genuinely surprising (the chiaroscuro string section in "Illuminine" wouldn’t sound out of place in a Left Banke song. Whether he'll leave them be or giddily scrape the colors from their lush canvases remains to be seen. Nicolas Jaar's 2011 album Space is Only Noise also has an obstinate streak. In some ways, its closest cousin is ambient electronic music, but a few minutes into any of his barren, minimalist songs proves that description inadequate. "Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust" starts out a slinky R&B number, keyboards blinking like a broken traffic light and Jaar's tiny voice gliding seductively over the notes, but it stops on a dime halfway through and starts unraveling—an out-of-tune string section stumbles in on their way to rehearsing a Charles Ives song, an Ennio Morricone guitar slithers by like a snake on dry earth. That the very next song is glitchy and stuttering only makes the album more confounding.
Björk (multiple dates and locations) has also spent the better part of her career acting independent of genre. Each of her eight albums is constructed from completely different DNA—Post was neon-like electropop, Medulla a strange symphony created from nothing but the human voice. Her latest, Biophilia, was accompanied by a collection of 10 iPad applications that allowed listeners to manipulate the songs in a series of ways, effectively tearing down the division between creator and audience. Over the course of a 10-night residency—with some dates at Roseland Ballroom and others and the New York Hall of Science—she'll be taking that notion to its logical conclusion. Performed in the round, with the nearest audience member "no more than a few yards from the stage," the performances will feature specially-designed instruments (among them, "four 10-foot pendulum harps"), a 24-piece Icelandic choir, and an array of specifically-designed visuals. As if all that isn't ambitious enough, the Hall of Science is also hosting a series of workshops, designed by Björk, designed to use the album's themes to teach middle school students about the world around them. Coming from Björk, it's not especially surprising. When genre constricted her, she transcended it. It was only a matter of time before music constricted her, too.
