They are a very easy band to like. They’re fun, they’re immensely talented, they make very good music and after this concert, you can add excellent live to that list.
Shy Girls
The opening act Shy Girls were mostly good, but a little inconsistent. Their first couple of songs were enjoyable, but the ones that followed were honestly a little boring. All told, they provided an enjoyable backdrop to the crowd’s conversations, but never really managed to shift the focus to the stage. They were a little too self-indulgent to be truly interesting, especially when their performance moved further into the emotional. I do appreciate a band that pulls out a soprano saxophone though, even if it is mostly for pop appeal.
Haim
It is easy to underestimate just how talented and versatile a band Haim is. Their opening songs turned the vocals down and the guitars up for some hard rock including an extended jam of Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well“. They possess a tremendous amount of technical skill and were perfectly at ease shredding to start the show.
From there though, the concert broke into a more melodic set. Their ballads were excellent live. Both “Honey & I” and “Running If You Call My Name” were outstanding. Additionally, “My Song 5” could have started a mosh pit. There was not a single weak performance in the entire set.
Unsurprisingly, their stage presence was also incredible. Este’s bassfaces were everything they were promised to be, Alana was exactly the cute youngest sister that her twitter account @babyhaim would lead you to believe and Danielle appeared to channel Jimi Hendrix in her guitar solos. This was not only a great concert to see, this was fun as well.
For their encore, they brought out their parents to perform a song from their Rockinhaim days, a funky number called “Mustang Sally.” They followed that with “The Wire”, the one hit that the main performance missed and ended with everyone on the drums.
This was exactly what a great concert should be. There was no flash, there were no gimmicks, there was just good music and a fun band. This was a joy to watch.
Speedy Ortiz’s debut album released just about half a year ago, and we loved it, as did many others. Their latest EP, Real Hair continues their style of lo-fi 90’s inspired alternative rock and their trend of making amazing music.
This album is wish fulfillment of everyday dreams. “Shine Theory” speaks of leaving neighbors scary notes while they’re away at work. That’s the first step. That’s a throwaway dream. A common, fondly held kind of dream, but still to be discarded in a moment as is, quite correctly, that lyric. This is the setting, this is how you begin to understand that she is you and that I am you and that none of us are very nice. Still, I have dreams and you have dreams and she has dreams and this album is the satisfaction of them all.
Like its predecessor, Real Hair is a love letter to the early 90’s. Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. are unabashedly drawn from, but form a support, not a straightjacket. “Oxygal” for instance makes creative use of form to create a sound that would be dissonant were Speedy Ortiz not so good at their music. The guitars are excellent and Sadie Dupuis’ vocals amaze. The music itself is rough, defying the shininess endemic to modern alternative rock and leaving in its stead an honest commitment to the sound. Hero worship is a desire, not to be the person worshiped, but to have accomplished what that person has done. Speedy Ortiz here have written the perfect kind of love letter, a letter from one peer to another.
The lyrics cover standards of everyman life. Self-loathing and toxic relationships have never been far from the indie songwriter’s pen, but Sadie Dupuis is brutally honest and human as she goes over them. Additionally, the lyrics are nothing short of poetic. Self-deception and raw desires and all of the pettiness and glories of personal lives are mixed in the whirlwind that is this EP. Every time that you have felt hurt and trapped not only by the world, but by yourself, and was unable to communicate even to yourself why you hurt and just wished you could talk so that maybe you could begin to understand, Real Hair is the fulfillment of those wishes.
Real Hair is a wonderful four songs, and I highly recommend that you listen to it.If you’ve ever wished for another 90’s alternative rock album with excellent music and whip-smart lyrics, it turns out that Real Hair can satisfy that wish as well.
Chick Corea is one of the few giants still left in jazz, and The Vigil shows no signs of him slowing down. It’s been quite a while since his time on In A Silent Way or Bitches’ Brew or his time with Return to Forever, but even at 72, he can still put out an exceptional jazz album.
A few missteps keep this from truly being a masterpiece. The vocals in Outside of Space mar an otherwise excellent song and the album is a touch predictable in places. Nevertheless, this is an excellent jazz album and showcases a highly talented group from whom I hope more is soon to come.
De La Soul is one of those bands that could have defined hip-hop. Their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising, now 25 years old, was widely considered one of the best of its year and achieved commercial success. That album could have brought about the Daisy Age of hip-hop. For better or worse, that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, De La Soul is one of the pillars of old-school hip-hop and their live show more than justifies that respect.
This is the first old-school hip-hop concert that I’ve ever been to and I never realized how much space is in those old songs for audience participation. The choruses all seemed to have been designed for the audience to shout along with. You haven’t heard any of their music properly until you’ve been in a mob all singing it out together.
Their crowd skills were incredible. They talked and joked constantly and the audience response was intense. They brought a forest of hands up from the beginning of the concert and that forest was not felled until the concert finished. It was quite the intense performance and the crowd showed the energy that deserved. Also many points for the constant San Francisco shout-outs.
The show went over much of their stable of hits, including Me, Myself and I, Oodles of Os, Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey), A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturdays” and Oooh. There were a few missteps in their performance, but that was just part of the charm. This was three guys who have been around since the beginning of hip-hop and never forgotten how much fun it is supposed to be. They wanted everyone to enjoy the show and delivered enough that anything else was impossible.
As I have said multipletimesbefore, I really like Janelle Monáe. She’s smart, imaginative and energetic. Her music is rarely short of excellent. Also, her live performances are incredible. So, when salesforce.com sponsored a free show of hers to celebrate their 15th anniversary and accompanying food drive, I jumped at the chance to see her live again.
This may have been a free show, but it was certainly treated like any other. It opened with an overture leading into her entrance onstage in a straightjacket to follow the Palace of the Dogs narrative that she’s spent the better part of the last decade setting up. From there, she jumped straight into a solo “Givin’ Em What They Want” that never seemed to miss Prince at all. Janelle Monáe was clearly able to supply everything anyone could need all by herself.
The show was a mixture of hits from all over her discography. “Dance Apocalyptic” led into “Sincerely, Jane” flawlessly. “Electric Lady” saw her moonwalk across the entire stage, and was followed with covers of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” and “ABC”. “Q.U.E.E.N” saw her do both her own and Erykah Badu’s parts of the song, but sadly “Tightrope” did not include a stab at Big Boi’s rap. As ever, the show closed with a very extended “Come Alive” jam.
Janelle Monáe is one of my favorite people to see live. Her sincerity and enthusiasm are absolutely unparalleled. Her shows are meticulously produced and her stage presence is staggering. There are very few performers with her talent working today. She sets quite the high bar for her competition and shows like this one consistently do the impossible. They push that bar higher.
You always know what you are going to get with a National album. As ever, Trouble Will Find Me is a technically skilled yet highly accessible alternative rock album. They remain evocative and emotional. They maintain their darkness and their humor. They are still very personal. The only issue is that their sound has also stayed constant.
It often feels that every single song by The National is the same. This is blatantly untrue, even when brought down to the scale of just this album. “Don’t Swallow The Cap”, for instance, pushes you forward with its plays while songs like “Fireproof” lounge in their melancholy. Also, quality shifts. The two aforementioned songs are excellent, while songs like “Sea of Love” and “Slipped” are fine, but instantly forgettable.
This is an album to listen to while staring out at a gray sky. Occasionally, phrases or tunes will reach your mind and draw a smile. They are after all a clever band. Lines like “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with” from “Demons” are too human not to relate to. However, like the rain outside, the album is too familiar and too uniform to ever interrupt your inner dialogue, and an album needs to do more to impress.
Kid Cudi is his own person. You can’t judge his third album Indicud the way you would judge other rap albums because it doesn’t feel the need to play by the same rules. Seriousness and wordplay are no part of this picture. Freshness is always a good thing though, especially when the result is something like “Red Eye”, which is essentially Haim being Haim. However, it still needs substance. His earlier songs, like the exceptional “Day ‘N’ Nite” managed to feel novel in subject matter as well, but this album doesn’t quite hold up to the same standard.
This is a very listenable album, but the sort that neither expects nor rewards deep and sustained listening. It is filled with bright spots, especially when the guests show up. The aforementioned Haim song is excellent, the RZA shows up for a monstrous anthem with “Beez” and Kendrick Lamar is, as always, remarkable on Solo Dolo Pt. 2. Kid Cudi’s production is strong throughout, bringing out the best of both his guests and himself, as shown on “Unfuckwittable.”
This is, all told, an enjoyable album. It is an album with an expiry date though. Give it a spin though. As long as you don’t expect to go anywhere, it is an enjoyable ride.
Childish Gambino’s second album because the internet is in parts brilliant. It is also in parts terrible. In that respect, it does bring to mind its namesake. It also comes with a 75 page script for a screenplay. That however, does not bring to mind its namesake. At least it wouldn’t were it not filled with emojis, internet-speak and embedded videos. You can read it here if you choose to. I did not.
Briefly, the screenplay is about “The Boy”, really Donald Glover, who lives off his wealthy father, really Rick Ross, and lives in the internet. The theme of the internet is sprinkled in impressively throughout the album. Interestingly, the sheer density of references to the immediate present give the album a slightly futuristic feel. These lyrics would not look out of place on reddit. On one hand, he sneaks ain’t nobody got time for that into a line, but on the other he makes a chant of GPOY into a chorus which, while not as bad as it seems on paper, is still pretty bad. This sort of inconsistency flows into the rest of the lyrics as well. Clever C-3PO lines and an excellent play on KKK sit next to Bangkok puns. Throwaway references to subjects like the Gaza strip don’t do much either. Still, he is the only person in rap who would make a line out of onomatopoeia.
He has all the technical skill he needs as a rapper and his production is excellent. The album comes in harder than Camp, he practically opens with the line “And I still put it down like the family dog.” He is actually quite a good singer as well, showing up well on “telegraph ave.” and the Weeknd-like “flight of the navigator.” I really like “3005” and the music video that goes with it and the entire final run from “flight of the navigator” to “life: the biggest troll.” I just don’t like having to skip past the other half of the album.
This is certainly an interesting album and it contains enough quality to deserve quite a few listens but is ultimately too unreliable to unreservedly recommend.
It’s been a pretty full year for music and now as it comes to an end, it’s time to separate the gods from the frauds. These are the five albums that struck deepest within me.
5. The Electric Lady by Janelle Monáe
Janelle Monáe is a hard person to describe. Adjectives flow easily; inventive, bold, imaginative, talented, but as she proudly states, she defies every label. The Electric Lady makes parts four and five of her seven part science fiction concept album series and lives up to the high standard of the previous entries. This albums sees her a little more free and a little more comfortable than in her previous work. While The ArchAndroid is still definitely the better album, the soul that fills the second half of The Electric Lady is still wonderful. Janelle Monáe has consistently been one of the most interesting people in music since Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) was released in 2007 and The Electric Lady does nothing but reinforce her already solid status. This is a fun, danceable album and I recommend it to everyone.
You can read the full album review here and our review of her concert here.
4. Without A Net by Wayne Shorter
Wayne Shorter’s return to Blue Note after 43 years is an astounding piece of modern jazz. This is fiery jazz, the kind that forces you to sit up and take notice of it. Not only is it of unparalleled technical proficiency, but the band members are almost psychic in how well they play off each other. They’ve been working with each other for over a decade now though, so I suppose that is only to be expected. Although this is beautiful jazz, it may be a little too obscure for people new to the genre. For anyone who has heard Wayne Shorter before though, not having this album would be a sin.
For those still on the fence, the full album review is here.
3. Days Are Gone by Haim
Each of my final three albums is an emotion and this one is happiness. This is a fun album to listen to and a fun band to watch. There’s none of the pretentiousness that characterizes so much of the indie scene. This is a very varied and consistently excellent album and doesn’t feel the need to shove the fact in your face at every turn (I’m looking at you, Arcade Fire). It’s hard to single out any songs in particular, “Honey & I” feels like Stevie Nicks at her best, “My Song 5” has an incredible bass riff, “Running If You Call My Name” is heartfelt, all of their songs are worth talking about. This is the band that loves making their music as much as I love hearing it.
If you’ve never heard the album, then it’s hard to explain why this album is so important. After all, indie musicians borrowing heavily from past music is nothing new and this is just Joy Division with a female singer. The thing is though that this album is very, very good. Painfully, brokenly good. Each of these last three albums is an emotion, and this is depression.
This album burns with a searing, undecorated intensity. Jehnny Beth screams and taunts throughout while the rest of the band perform their bludgeon-work upon your prone body. This is not a subtle album, an album with whom you can reason and share quiet moments by the fireside. This will shout at you, often just a single word, and you will listen because you know that the rest of the day is just going to be a pale echo of those submissive moments.
1. Yeezus by Kanye West
Yeezus (full review here) is Kanye at his biggest, his most brash, his funniest, his most aggressive. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is still probably his best album, but that did not make the sort of statement that Yeezus did. This album’s emotion is anger. Leaving aside the refusal to release singles until well after the album released, the music is intentionally difficult, the lyrics intentionally off-putting. Discomfort is the aim, but not without reward as well.
“I’m In It” for instance is some of the most menacing music I’ve heard this year, but has no problems juking you with unexpected comparisons and a mention of swag-hili. It is then followed by the exceptional “Blood On The Leaves”, which samples Nina Simone’s cover of “Strange Fruit” beautifully. “New Slaves” is rage coalesced (and fully reviewed here) as “I Am A God” is hubris. Every line in “Black Skinhead” is a call to action. Even “Bound 2” makes for an excellent closer.
You can see the work, the brilliance and the anger behind every line. You can, in fact, see Kanye West.
Top Five Records 