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Yo La Tengo w/ The Rosebuds @ Starr Hill

Since the opening of Satellite Ballroom and the renaissance of Starr Hill, Charlottesville music lovers have been a little bit spoiled. Big acts come to town with alarming regularity now, and it seems like we all take it for granted. That big Peaches show? Oh, I’ll just get tickets the day or two before. Of Montreal? Again? It’s easy to forget that just a few years ago there was a huge drought of shows here, with poor students forced to drive two hours to DC to see any band big enough to not fit in the basement of Tokyo Rose. It’s easy to remind yourself, missing a show, that someone else will be here within a few weeks, and you’ll probably want to see them more anyway, and man, that bank account sure is suffering right now.

But Yo La Tengo is different. Yo La Tengo is special.

The seminal indie-rock band has been here before, but not in almost seven years. That means Clinton was still president, the dot-com market hadn’t yet crashed, and I was still a senior in high school: in other words, it was ages ago. Last Thursday night, they returned to a sold-out crowd, a packed upper room at Starr Hill, and plenty of resentment from those who weren’t able to get tickets.

(more…)

This originally appeared in The Declaration on 9 February 2006.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia. Maybe the primary colors fried our brains. Maybe we’re hiding from a geopolitical order in which everyone acts like they’re six-year-olds by remembering our six-years-old selves. Or maybe it’s the realization that we can’t play these new-fangled games with their four shoulder buttons and their analog sticks and their three-dimensional gameplay. For whatever reason, the original NES has been experiencing a cultural revival these past few years. Sure, the scope of that revival has ranged from the dorky (Nintendo controller belt buckles) to the kitschy (an emo band named after the Konami code). But the best part is all the attention being paid to those 8-bit soundtracks of our youth.

Because let’s face it: those songs were good. Limited to such a small range of options to make the background music—a handful of Midi tracks, and that’s it—the composers of the 8-bit era managed to make songs that the geekier among us still hum from time to time. Take the Mario theme, or the opening track from the Legend of Zelda. Awesome, right? Those short melodic hooks work so well that they’re still influencing game music today, even with the 32-bit sound that the Playstation and Xbox can throw out.

So what the Advantage do is take those songs and cover them with a live band. They’re not the only guys that do this; the Minibosses, from Phoenix, do essentially the same thing, have been doing it longer, and cover Ninja Gaiden. The difference is that The Advantage cover everything from Mario to Contra to Metroid to Double Dragon III, and they’ve got the guitarist from Hella (though he plays the drums). The Minibosses are a wee bit looser in their songs, giving their tracks a bit of a punk rock, let?s-crowd-surf-with-our-power-pad vibe; the Advantage replicate the songs more faithfully, with a couple of weird time signatures and a math rock accuracy ’cause, hey, it’s the dude from Hella.

Given that math rock is essentially making Nintendo songs with stranger time signatures, it’s amazing it took until last year for The Advantage to release their first, self-titled album. That one focused on the games that everyone played: the Mario themes, the Zelda dungeon (they had the decency to leave the overworld theme—quite possibly the best video game song of all time—well enough alone). The new album, Elf-Titled, takes quite a few of its tracks from obscure games you might not have played. But that’s fine, since the songs are still awesome. “Batman—Stage One” doesn’t sound like any of the Batman movies, but the bassline is so rocking that you won?t care. You probably never played The Guardian Legend (but you should), but “Corridor 1″ hurtles you through space just like it should. And I swear that “Duck Tales —Moon” was ripped off by Slash for “Sweet Child O? Mine,” but that’s probably all in my head.

Sure, the element of nostalgia counts for a lot—it’s great to suddenly hear the Kraid boss music from Metroid, for example, or level five of Double Dragon II. But that alone wouldn’t make this a good album. The performances are amazing, but good musicianship doesn’t make an album, either. It’s the songwriting that makes it rock, regardless of how much time you spent in front of the TV with a controller in hand.

The one problem with the album is that, depending on the mood you’re in, the songs might get a little repetitive. But it’s a testament to the quality of The Advantage that that rarely happens, even when the theme they’re drawing from is just ten or fifteen seconds long. And much more often, it creates the trancelike state that you used to hit with these games. It’s good for paper writing. Or for dancing like an idiot. Or for playing old-school video games with the TV on mute. Nostalgia for 8-bit music only goes so far.

Some ideas just make sense in retrospect. No matter how odd it might have seemed at the time that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, or that the Red Sox would win the World Series on the night of a lunar eclipse, or that a late-night block of cartoons aimed at college students would be a runaway success, looking back makes it clear that these events were necessary–nay, ordained. And some things are immediately recognizable as bad ideas, like going to war in Iraq or making a hip-hop album about a block of cartoons aimed at college students. These ideas aren’t just bad–they’re the sort of things that bring countries and careers to ruin.

Unless, of course, you bring together a brilliant producer who doesn’t get the respect he deserves and a rapper who tends to get respect from the “wrong” quarters–the English majors, the jazz fiends, the backpackers. The Mask and The Mouse, in which Danger Mouse and MF Doom collaborate in just the first of the huge collaborations of the fall, could have turned into a horrible, syncophantic whorish enterprise, destroying careers and sullying–nay, negating–the name of Adult Swim in our hearts.

Sure, Danger Mouse has caught flak for being gimmicky. But The Grey Album was another one of those totally-obvious-in-retrospect ideas, and was the perfect vehicle to showcase his twisted pop genius. This is a man who can find the pop in everything from reggae beats to opera arias. Here, his beats are much more tense and compressed than most of his earlier work. Danger doesn’t know when to stop at points. Drumlines, violins, guitars, flutes and (the has-to-be-a-reference-) accordion get layered over one another until the whole thing threatens to break, and that he keeps it from the brink of cacophony is a testament to the man’s skill. There’s, like, four different drumline mixed together on “The Mask,” with horn stabs and soft synths trading off on top of it. “Perfect Hair” uses a flute solo to sound light even with all the complexity going on beneath it, while “Mince Meat”–one of the simpler songs on the album–still keeps morphing underneath Doom’s steady flow.

Because what Doom does here is dominate–nay, destroy: presented with a beat that morphs instead of the sudden jazzy shifts that marked Madvilliany, the man goes all English major on us. People expecting the same inventive wordplay and absurd rhyme schemes that have marked his career so far won’t be disappointed, though the similes have been turned down a notch. Doom doesn’t so much ride the beat as use his flow as its counterpoint. Watch Doom dodge and dart around the beat: on “Bada Bing” he starts by perfectly matching the rat-a-tat pace of the early song before coming unhinged and just loosely staying with the beat like a jazz soloist: “And Doom, [breath], maybe it’s him. / Called up my lady and said baby, it’s Slim. Make me up a margarita; I need to take a swim.” Chiasmus, effictio, blazon: this is the vocabulary one reaches for to describe Doom’s lines.

The specific Adult Swim content is hit or miss, though. Songs revolving around Harvey Birdman and Sealab 2021–for all of Doom’s previous success sampling cartoons–fall flat. It’s at it’s best when the characters have contributed something new to the album. Shake’s phone calls begging onto the album actually stay funny, and Meatwad performing “Beef Rap” off Mm..Food–that’s another one of those obviously-brilliant-in-retrospect ideas. The Mooninites make an appearance on the surprisingly not-childish “Vats of Urine.” Space Ghost shows up, not with Ghostface on “The Mask,” but to proclaim that, “America’s craving some Doom.” Lord knows it should be.

Who are the biters? Prefuse 73’s Scott Herren certainly has had enough of them. He takes criticism of his music personally, flipped out over the leaking and subsequent downloading of his new album, Surrounded by Silence, and is probably seeking out the Dec offices at this moment for the first two clauses of this sentence. The LP’s first track, titled “I’ve said all I have to say about them,” opens with a sample declaring, “fuck the biters.”

Fortunately, he has said all he has to say about them, quickly establishing that he’d rather let his creative abilities speak for themselves. And his abilities are ample; Herren’s technique for crafting beats differs greatly from most other producers. Unlike an RJD2 or a DJ Shadow, Prefuse 73 doesn’t allow cohesive samples. There’s no sped up soul samples on a Prefuse 73 track, no beat grabbed from a funk hit–or not, at least, anything you’d recognize. Instead, Herren chops everything up into tiny little pieces, letting the rhythm and melody and harmonies arise from the interplay of short, one or two beat samples. Sounds distort, become something apart from even themselves when he throws them together into this fashion. Even on the larger scale, he keeps the same plan, and blips of staccato notes suddenly bite into fuzzed out cacophony. Vocalists and guest instrumentalists typically find themselves just one more element for Herren to play with, and might find their contributions chopped up or, at the very least, worked low in the mix. The result–odd, considering how layered and complex the rhythms are on most tracks on the album–is that these incredibly dense songs wind up evoking wide-open landscapes. Surrounded by Silence does, in fact, drown the listener in a soundscape rather than propelling him forward.

The collaborating artists get more airtime on Surrounded by Silence than on past albums: almost every track has a guest vocalist of some sort. Ghostface, El-P, Aesop Rock, Masta Killa and GZA all contribute raps. Ghostface and El-P’s “Hideyaface” winds up being one of the best songs of the year so far, all Ghostface free association (Why does he mention the Newark Star-Ledger?) and El-P free aggression taking on–who else?–the biters. The Masta Killa- and GZA-driven “Just The Thought” runs around one of the more straightforward beats Prefuse 73 has put together, a bouncy concoction that doesn’t last nearly as long as it should. Unlike in the past, their vocals are mostly untouched; it seems that Herren who “didn’t want to record rappers rapping over a beat” on his first album, Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, has come to terms with just how damn good it sounds.

But the other tracks–based around work with Blonde Redhead, the twins Claudia and Alejandra Deheza, and Tyondae Braxto, amongst others–find him chopping samples again like a sushi chef,* doing what he does best. Listen to the swelling horn on “Minutes away from you,” the way he keeps holding off the high point from the listener until just the right point. Listen to the looping strains of “love” on “Pastel Assassins,” the way he holds the song in stasis, refusing any sort of release for so long. Scott Herren knows what he wants, and he’s willing to work for it.

So why worry about the biters? They only push him to the next level, only make him focus on the vocals and his ability to produce a beat as much as his ability to create abstract landscapes, only force him to put himself on the line. The truth of the matter is that Scott Herren needs the biters, as much as he doesn’t want to admit it. He’ll never really be done talking about it, and that’s probably a good thing.

Aesop Rock is the Ben Marcus of rap. Like the author of Notable American Women and several extremely strange essays for McSweeney’s and The Believer, Aesop Rock (nee Ian Bavitz) tosses words in strange contexts and weird rhythms, twisting their meanings and granting ordinary words power that they lost long ago. Sure, a lot of times you won’t catch his exact point on the first listen–or the twentieth, for that matter. But for Aesop, the environment and feeling that his lyrics impart has always been more important than individual lines. Not that he doesn’t craft stuff you can’t help thinking to yourself at strange points during the days, but it will be more to puzzle out what he means.

His 2003 effort, Bazooka Tooth, was sprawling, messy and unfocused at places; supposedly the exploration of an alter ego (named Bazooka Tooth, natch), the production fuzzed over his lyrics and overlaid them on top of each other. Running at the upper end of the CD’s capacity–over 70 minutes–Aesop’s explorations of the character were mixed with Definitive Jux boasting and the sudden expansion of the city at one minute in time. Though good, as a hip-hop concept album, it couldn’t hold a candle to Mr. Lif’s I, Phantom.

So Fast Cars, clocking in at just over thirty minutes, represents a focus that Aesop Rock hasn’t had in years–it feels like an album squashed into EP length. It’s chock full of goodness, and there’s a lot to like here. The fuzzy lyrics are gone, as well as some of the more avant-garde staccato rhythms that he experimented with on Bazooka Tooth. What’s left is the smooth flow from Labor Days, and a surpringly focused set of songs on militarism, religion and other bugaboos of life in America these days. On “Fast Cars,” the title track, he comments that he’s “live from the ultra-fly sham city bunker where cults multiply alarmingly / Hush little baby, timeout / The black market mockingbirds can sing not a lick but lean to peck your eyes out.” For Aes Rock, terror lies behind every corner of the city; it’s unavoidable. On “Zodiaccupuncture,” he reminds the listener that “the hand cannons won’t ask about your zodiac, boy.”

The production is hit or miss. Aesop Rock splits the production duty with Blockhead, while “Winner Takes All” is produced by Rob Sonic. Half the songs are standard Definitive Jux beats, with heavy bass and Vangelis-style synths in the background evoking a future dystopia here today, and these tracks kind of all run together (though Aesop does vary his flow enough to keep them distinct). But both “Holy Smokes” and “Rickety Rackety” stand out. Blockhead builds “Holy Smokes” around a glockenspiel sample and adding drum beats that vary in intensity as Aesop vents about the Catholic Church sex scandal and the commercialization of religion. “Rickety Rackety” runs on a bouncy bass beat that propels even El-P to throw out a good verse or two. Considering this is Definitive Jux, the fact that you can actually dance to it is mindblowing. “Rickety” is hands down the best song on the album, grabbing that beat and using it to contrast the style of Aesop Rock, El-P and Camu Tao. El-P’s slightly off-rhythm lyrics and Camu Tao’s fast delivery complement the more measured style that Aesop Rock has cultivated throughout the entire album.

The album may be short, but that’s not a bad thing. Aesop Rock takes time to sink into, thanks to the density of his images and weird playing with language. But as an added bonus, the album comes with a booklet of all his lyrics from the past five releases–including Float and theDaylight EP–so that you can finally sit down, and figure out what he says and apply some English major techniques to this stuff. Don’t let his absurdity throw you off–there’s a lot in Aesop Rock’s lyrics, and it’s worth it to sit down with him for some relaxation and some cathartic city terror.

Hey, remember electroclash? That wonderful combination of electronic dance music with punk guitars and sensibility, that powerful weapon of mass distraction? Those international superstars with lasting power, like Fischerspooner and Peaches? Do you remember rocking out on the dance floor, with a Long Island in your hand, to “Emerge” and doing everything you could to forget that (a) 9/11 happened less than a year ago and (b) this particular aesthetic had been done before, back in the 80s, that decade that you were faking nostalgia for?

I don’t, particularly, as I was pretty drunk that entire summer. But for a while there, electroclash (or, y’know, dance-punk, which is what it was) was set up to be the next big thing from NYC. It eventually fizzled out, but not before leaving a bunch of great party albums like Fischerspooner’s #1 (and only), and two out of eight of the 2manyDJs mixes by the guys formerly known as Soulwax. And a couple of singles by James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, aka half of the production group the DFA. Soundsystem caught people’s attention–especially the attention of the

A radical proposition: let’s stop making fun of the French. “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” however clever it might have been at first, is old and played out; that whole “Freedom fries” thing was way overrated as humor and as an insult. Besides, any culture that can throw out anything as good an album as M83’s new Before the Dawn Heals Us clearly has something going for it.

M83 throws everything they’ve got at you: spiraling guitars, percussive drums and weird synthesizers. They switch moods as fast as they switch riffs; going from post-apocalyptic pastoral landscapes to full power–Oh hell, I’m just going to say it: It’s a concept album about nuclear war.

“Fields, Shorelines and Hunters” starts out as a just a simple bass drum beat underneath a few synthesizers, eventually devolving into a burst of static. The weird, NES boss-battle riff that starts out track six (alternatively named by the Atari logo, an asterisk and, on my iTunes, “6.”) disappears almost immediately in a mess of guitars and drums that themselves disappear to a fast paced beat seconds later, then come back underneath some synthesizers that can only be described as “soaring.” And then the next track, “I Guess I’m Floating,” takes all of that away for the sounds of children playing on a school playground and a series of short three-note sequences that provide some constancy over bass that ebbs and flows. And then it’s back into Nintendo level music again.

But it’s later in the album–as it flows into “Teen Angst” and “Safe” and “Let Men Burn Stars”–that the nuclear war thing–okay, maybe I’m reading too much into this–really pops up. “Falling stars exploding on the sea / God it’s beautiful! / The land and the roses slowly disappeared,” sings Anthony Gonzales on “Safe,” and then “A wounded angel is smiling at me,” as the synthesizers swell back up. It makes more sense listening to it than reading a descriptions of it. On “Teen Angst,” he sings “The planet is dying.”

So yeah, there’s an element of cheese-eating: the synthesizers get ridiculous at a couple of points, and the lyrics–especially the female vocals in “Moonchild” and “Car Chase Terror!”–take a little time to grow on you. That “Car Chase Terror!” is supposed to be a dialogue between a mother and daughter fleeing Satan, but are both voiced by the same vocalist, doesn’t make it any easier to understand.

But M83 never lets you get comfortable with just a simple riff unless it’s buried under lots of other stuff. For that reason, it doesn’t have the warmth of Air’s Talkie Walkie, or even the Virgin Suicides soundtrack. That’s not a particular problem, considering that it’s as powerful in its own right, creating a sense of distance in a way that still encourages engaging with the album. It’s the sort of thing that demands to be listened to on huge, good speakers with the lights turned low. It’s an album that should wash over you like an flowing tide or a nuclear blast. M83 understands that there is beauty in destruction, and throws at it you with force.

I write a lot. I barely finish anything. In an effort to finally clear out my hard drive of those huge, space-filling Word 97 files, it’s time to spread the unfinished gospel to the world. I present to you: Decent But Unmotivated Week! Because I’ve got nothing better.

David Cross - Shut Up You Fucking Baby

For all those still angry that I’ve seen Radiohead and the Beta Band live when all you’ve seen is a giant puddle of water, I give you this: two years ago I drove up to Manhattan for what promised to be one of the greatest comedy concerts of all time. It was called Eating It, and it was a special edition of a weekly showcase that took place at the Luna Lounge. Where normally it was a few, under-the-radar comics that hadn’t yet earned their Comedy Central Presents episode, the show I was supposed to see was topped up with big names. Janeane Garofalo. Marc Maron. The Upright Citizens Brigade. God help me, even members of the State were supposedly reuniting. And headlining the show was the irrepressible David Cross.

If you don’t think you’ve heard of David Cross, you’re wrong. He may not be a big name celebrity, but he’s appeared in so many things that once you figure out who he is, you’ll be slapping your forehead like a Matt Groening character. Or something. But anyway: he’s one of the original “meta-comics” (and yes, even I’m getting tired of “meta” now), half the creative force behind HBO’s seminal Mr. Show, and he’s had cameos in more movies than you’d care to imagine. I was going to see him, live, and was willing to pay for tolls, gas, and parking for the drive to Manhattan to do so.

I think you see where this is going.

Mr. Cross never showed up, for reasons I don’t remember. The show as a whole was still pretty damn good, but I always felt like I had missed something special. With the release of his first solo comedy album, I’ve learned that I did.

Radiohead - Amnesiac

I have a riddle for all you loyal Dec readers that may sound like apostasy from the guy who drove 750 miles to Toronto to see Radiohead play live last fall. I want you to keep an open mind about it, even though, by now, your eyes have been drawn to the paragraph below and you are, as you come back to finish this sentence, seething in anger and rage and wanting to meet me so you can punch me in the face. I promise I will explain everything.

Here is the riddle:

Q. What do Radiohead and the Dave Matthews Band have in common?

A. They’re both better live than on albums.

Some of you may be wondering, what the hell is wrong with this kid? How the fuck does he compare Radiohead with Dave Matthews? How dare he say Radiohead is better live than on record? Didn’t he “get” the masterpiece that was Kid A? How it worked only as an album rather than a collection of individual songs?

Well, yeah. And don’t get me wrong, I liked Kid A. (Just ask my roommate, who was a second-hand listener to little else during September and October.) Also, with Dave Matthews, “better” remains a relative term. Finally, I am definitely pushing this comparison as a way to trick you, loyal Dec reader, into reading the rest of this article. But I digress.

Amnesiac, as most Radiohead fans know, consists mostly of songs that were recorded at the same time as Kid A. It has been described as a more commercial work than Kid A. It has been described as a warmer work than Kid A. It has been described as a return to their earlier, more accessible albums. It is none of these things. Yes, there are songs that are commercial and songs that are as warm as Radiohead gets.

This was to have appeared in the Dec. But it didn’t.

In terms of flying under the Dec’s radar, the Flaming Lips rank up there with Grandaddy and the Microphones on the semi-infamous list of “Bands who released good albums that somehow failed to make the year-end top five issue.” Like The Sophtware Slump and The Glow, Part II, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin went unnoticed by Dec staffers until a belligerent group of students tied us down and made us listen. It was, to say the least, an enlightening and slightly erotic experience.

Actually, in 1999, I was still in high school, but the fact remains that The Soft Bulletin was one of the best albums to come out that year. Combining complex musical arrangements with off-beat lyrics (i.e., “odd,” not “without rhythm”), the Lips’ crazy musical style had only become more refined in the decade since Transmissions from the Satellite Heart and “She Don’t Use Jelly” brought them to the national spotlight. From the sparse beauty of “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” to the watch beep in “What is the Light?” (not to mention the lunacy of including remixes of some songs as bonus tracks), The Soft Bulletin presented pop rock as seen from the eyes of a sonic madman.

Though it contains no watch beeps, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a more than worthy successor to the Lips’ last album. There’d been talk of the band dramatically changing its sound, and it’s true–to a point. Like so many other bands, from Radiohead to list-brothers Grandaddy, the Flaming Lips have added electronic elements to their songs. Still, let’s face it: this is 2002, and boxed drum beats and starting a song’s hook on the previous track can’t really be called “experimental” any more (sorry, Wilco). This is, for better or for worse, the way the quieter rock is going these days. And it works: the new stuff never distracts from the music, instead feeling like just one more set of tricks that Wayne Coyne has in his already formidable bag.

At first glance, the album–which looks like it’s the Japanese import version with Kenji characters liberally scattered throughout the package–appears to be some sort of manga concept album. But it’s not so much a concept album as a concept EP surrounded by other material. Yoshimi opens with “Fight Test,” probably the most active and upbeat track on the album. A bouncy keyboard hook and layered vocals over the chorus draw you in to the record. Sure, I can’t figure out whether the Lips are advocating against pacificism, but it probably doesn’t matter. The Lips’ songs aren’t always about something; they just sound good (see also, “She don’t use butter / She don’t use cheese / She don’t use jelly / Or any of these . . .”). But more likely it’s intended to set up the title track later in the album.

And then sometimes they are: “Sympathy 3000-21 / One More Robot” takes the band very much into Grandaddy’s territory. Over a subdued bass beat, Coyne sings about a robot that tries to emulate emotions. “And a sense of coldness detaches,” he sings, “as it tries to comfort your sadness.” “Robot” captures the somewhat pathetic state of both a robot that tries and fails to emulate sympathy, and a human race that has become dependant on such robots. The titular song, divided into two tracks, is the most specifically manga-influenced song on the album. A young girl takes on giant robots that are attacking the city. Back-up vocalists and a funky drumbeat courtesy Steven Drozd turn what could be a depressing song into a very happy one. And then there’s the scratchy bass noises (to represent the robots, natch) that seem like they came straight from the old Super Nintendo game Earthbound (which also involved children fighting evil attacking robots; go figure). The second track could even have been one of the battle songs: the lyrics are listed simply as, “(screaming).”

As good as the manga/anime concept would have been stretched to album length, after “Yoshimi” the Lips just go back to making cool music. “In the Morning of the Magicians” is a meditation on the nature of love, and “Do You Realize??” on time and death. The entire album is much more subdued than past albums have been, even The Soft Bulletin, but that’s not a bad thing. Not even close to it: The Flaming Lips have made an album that is one of the best after-party albums since The Beta Band’s Hot Shots II, and one that is certainly in the running for at least one Dec staffers’ year end Best Of list.

This article appeared in modified form in The Declaration on 24 October 2001.

Woe to the unfortunate bands whom contract that most horrible disease, Rock Savioritis, especially if they’re on tour at the time. Radiohead, for example, came down with the condition while they were touring in support of OK Computer. They had a horrible time, pretty much stopped caring about their shows (remember the moment in Meeting People Is Easy where Thom, standing still, just held the microphone out to the audience during “Creep?”), and very nearly broke up. It took them nearly four years to come out with their next album, and it was drastically different than anything they had done before.

The Strokes, who played last Monday at the 9:30 Club in Washington, seemed to have been afflicted with the same ailment. Their album, Is This It, has been hailed as one of the greatest rock records in years by just about everyone, including the Dec. Constantly. Insistently. Word of the New York City-based group’s impending greatness reached us from across the ocean over the summer, and built up as the album neared its release date. Hype is a very bad thing, certainly: it creates anticipation beyond what should be reasonably expected from even the highest quality events, which inevitably depreciates the actual product (note the final episode of Seinfeld). The concert was no exception to this rule.

The Moldy Peaches, who also hail from NYC, opened. The Peaches consist of two vocalists who sing odd songs, and over time added a drummer and a few guitarists and what-have you. They came out on stage in costume, doing their best to surprise the audience (like you could get a rise out of this audience, anyway–but I’ll get to that). The two vocalists consisted one really, really hyper guy, who flailed himself across the stage, and one girl, wearing a large, blond wig who just kind of stood there clutching the microphone like it was the only thing keeping her from tipping over. Oh, and they really didn’t sing well. That’s the fun part.

The songs they sung were basically of the inane, gleefully offensive vein, many revolving around the girl’s unpopularity as a youngin. There was one song where she sang about “want[ing] to watch cartoons” with the subject of her adoration, and another called “Who’s Got the Crack?” The group reminded me of nothing so much else as the Bloodhound Gang, minus the Gang’s interesting, dynamic stage presence (an example: pulling a kid up out of the audience and forcing him to drink an entire case of Sprite) and clever wordplay. Compare and contrast: the lyrics of the Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof Is On Fire” (”Well, if I go to hell / I hope that I will burn well / I’ll spend my days with J.F.K., Martha Raye, Marvin Gaye and Lawrence Welk”) with “Who’s Got the Crack?” (”It’s hard to be a garbage man when a sailor stole my glove”). I’d provide context, except that (a) I don’t remember any and (b) the line had no context anyway. It did have the effect of having the whole audience utter a collective, “huh?”

So that was the Moldy Peaches. They played a rather long set, unfortunately, about an hour and fifteen minutes or so (I might be wrong, but I wasn’t wearing a watch, and thus cannot be sure.) There was a longish pause in between bands; we made fun of odd videos that the 9:30 club played.

The Strokes finally came out. The whole place went wild. Headbanging, crowd surfing, tossing one another around . . . it was wild. Actually, it wasn’t. There was clapping and a few people shouted, some heads bobbing as the band played the first chords to “Is This It,” the first song of the album. But for the most part, nobody really moved. Though there were a few jumping pockets in the audience, everyone else pretty much stayed still. Now, I understand that not everyone comes from a family where dancing, or at least attempting to move in a rythymic to music, is instilled from birth. But rock is an especially energetic genre of music, and nothing angers me so much as people sitting around on their hands.

Julian Casablancas, the lead singer, didn’t move around anymore than the majority of the audience did. His main movement was the act of lighting a cigarette. Other than that, he stood in front of the microphone and let his vocals drip out of his mouth into the microphone. In other words, not particularly enthusiastic about singing his songs. This was a very sad thing. The songs that had so interested me on the album just ran together. Also not helping was the fact that Casablancas wasn’t interested in interacting with the audience, introducing songs occasionally but nothing of note else. All these things combined to give a sense of distance, which doesn’t contribute to enjoyment of music. As one of my friends noted afterwards, they write such great songs but don’t have much interest in performing them.

They opened with the first song on the album, played one song that was on the British release of the album but not the American, “New York City Cops,” and ended with “Take It Or Leave It,” the last song on the album. That was it. Twelve songs, and I, who had listened to the album one or two times prior to the concert, can’t really remember the setlist beyond that. The extreme economy of the set, thirty or forty minutes at best, didn’t help by reminding us that the Moldy Peaches were on for so damn long.

You can’t really blame them. They’ve put up so long with hype and brilliant reviews that, well, they couldn’t live up to the hype and be brilliant. Rock Savioritis is a dangerous disease, more damaging to a band than a CD case filled with anthrax spores. Anthrax can be defeated with Cipro, but there’s no anti-biotic to rock criticism (I suppose this implicates myself, too, in an odd way). But at the same time, I have to wonder: the fact that they’ve only written twelve songs thus far, apparently, and their dispassionate live playing, calls into question whether they’re going to be able to continue on in the future. The concept of the Strokes calling their album, “Is This It,” now seems less like a mockery of everyone wondering if they are The Chosen Band, the saviors of rock, and more a question of: “Will there be any more?”