When Dan Deacon came out into the crowd and stood in front of his rig of electronics, which was in front of a row of five large speakers set up on the Echo’s stage, he told us that he’d just got in on a flight after attending his grandfather’s wake. The crowd howled morosely and Deacon said, “No, no, It’s OK, it’s OK, in fact, I’m excited for him… This song is called Red F.”

It was insanity from that point on. At the simple announcement of the song the crowd went insane. I was standing in at the back of the venue like I normally do, waiting to see what happens, and what happened was astounding. I’ve been to shows before where the audience gets moving. Usually it takes a couple songs before the majority of the crowd gets into the movement, but for Dan Deacon almost the entire audience, packed in around him, threw their arms in the air and started dancing.

I didn’t know what to expect from Dan Deacon. I listened to all of Bromst a couple times and I had some idea that the show would involve a bunch of people standing around with intelligent looks on their faces listening to his complicated and noisy form of electronic music… but dance to it like there was nothing else in the world, like there was nobody watching? I never expected that. I never heard the dance music in Deacon’s Bromst until I saw it first hand.

Someone pulled out a massive stitched together sheet made out of multiple blankets and it spread out over the top of the audience, hovering in the air above us all, held aloft by the mass of limbs and hands jutting up into the air, catching the strobe lights and the lasers, and I felt, in that moment, like I would simply expire if I didn’t get myself in there and start dancing with everyone else.

Note: I don’t dance. I don’t like to move my idiot body around. I’m tall and skinny and (most importantly) extremely white. I’m all sharp angles and awkward movements. I knew that if I went into this crowd, this specific crowd, I would be at home with a large number of people who didn’t give half a shit what I did. So, dance I did, sandwiched among a undulating, violently moving throng of people, with a sheet above us keeping in the heat we were generating.

After Red F, or maybe after another song, Deacon stopped us and had us put our right arms in the air, stand on our tip toes, and reach for something invisible as hard as we can. Then we were instructed to leave only our index finger raised, and slowly bring it down onto the top of the head of someone else random around us. All the heads in front of me were taken so I turned around and put my finger on the head of the older gentleman behind me, a white guy in his early 40′s who looked a little bit like an older version of me.

Deacon instructed us to repeat after him, a speech whose words I can’t remember right now, while staring directly into the eyes of the person we have our finger on. The gist of the speech, what made me feel awkward, was that we apologized deeply to this stranger, a heartfelt apology I’ve never uttered to anyone in my life, much less a stranger I’d probably never directly wronged in my life. The experience was, regardless, cathartic and unique.

The concert continued in much the same way set by Red F, with the crowd (and me) going completely insane. The mass of people would surge forward on him and his rig, and we’d get pushed back, sometimes by a couple of feet at a time, everyone falling all over each other but holding each other up. At one point I was launched (and how, I don’t know) out of the right side of the dance floor and almost hit the ground if it weren’t for some guy reaching his arm out and grabbing my hand flying through the air and pulling me back in.

Deacon’s tricks didn’t end with the apology. For Snookered, with its quiet and contemplative beginning, directed us to stare at the mirror ball in the ceiling with our arms in the air reaching for it, and to slowly converge together into the center of the room until we were all crammed together in a big circle. He spoke, telling us to think of a time that we were truly happy (if I remember correctly) in the way children are, to close our eyes and imagine this place and time, and to reach for it as hard as we can. We did, and when Snookered really got going we were so packed together that it was impossible to get apart, and we were left with no choice but to dance as one solid unit, one solid mass of excitement and energy.

He staged a dance off, in which the rules were that both dancers on the floor had to hold their right hands tightly together at all times, while keeping your left arm in the air with a single jazz-finger extended on your left hand. This was pretty much fucking insane, and by the third trade off no one was holding the others hand, and sometimes there were three people on the floor, and finally Deacon instructed everyone to “Get the fuck in there!” and it was madness again.

A friend of his lead all of us in an “interpretive dance” of one of his songs, which was fun, if a little awkward, as at one point I ended up with my dude friends ass in my face. He was lucky, as he ended up with some blonde chicks ass in his crotch. Near the end of the set Deacon led us in a massive human tunnel (like at weddings or something?) forming line which resulted in the majority of the attendees standing outside in the Echo’s smoking area, holding hands with a stranger. (I was holding hands in the air with a girl while her boyfriend stood uselessly next to me, apparently unwilling to hold hands with the girl he accidentally got paired with.)

A couple times I thought I might pass out from the strobe lights in my face and the sheer amount of energy I was expending on keeping my legs and arms in the air, but there was no escape from the crowd. In these moments I found myself happier than I’d ever been, with the thought in my head that I didn’t care if I passed out (the crowd would hold me up anyway), I just wanted to keep dancing, I just wanted to stay in this moment for as long as I could.

By the end of the show not an inch of my clothing wasn’t absolutely soaked through with sweat. I looked at myself in the mirror after and I saw a goddamn mess, but I had one helluva smile on my face and both friends I took to the show with me looked like they had the time of their life. I did, too, and for that, I have to say:

Thank you Dan Deacon.

Listen and Download @ http://driftedaway.staires.org

My taste in the last two months has shifted. It might be because of the influence of my ex-girlfriend (who seems to be becoming my girlfriend yet again) who’s into music you can actually move your idiot body around to, or my best friend, who’s also into music you can actually move your idiot body around to. My girlfriend’s taste falls more in the “happy wave your arms around and rattle your head” kind of dance. My friend’s falls more in the “go to a rave and get fucked up and maybe pass out and die from dehydration” kind of dance. These two people have seemingly massively influenced my listening habits.

It started before them, however, when I was recommended Dan Deacon by one of my closest Twitter friends. I wasn’t really able to enjoy Deacon’s Bromst on first listen because it is so noisy, that seemingly specific to Baltimore noisiness, but I heard something in it. I was so impressed by the fact that all his samples sounded so organic (and I learned later that this is not because they are good samples, but because actual musicians and instruments play his compositions) that even though I downloaded the album illegally at first, and didn’t even like it very much, I bought it on Amazon MP3 just to be sure I had a pristine copy free of encoding errors.

Things progressed from there and I wound up falling in love with Holy Fuck, Passion Pit, YACHT, Red Wire Black Wire, and a variety of other synthy/dancey music. Meanwhile Deacon’s noisiness influenced me into discovering noise rock acts like Marnie Stern, Wavves, Ponytail, and others not included in this playlist. At this point I felt I’d discovered enough new music to throw together a playlist of some kind.

My original intention was to create the “staires! dance party” playlist, composed almost entirely of, you guessed it, songs you can dance to. I thought I could construct a good mood, a good flow, over the course of 70 some odd minutes that would be a good example of what you’d hear if I threw a party I was DJing. Unfortunately I quickly realized two things: 1.) I don’t have enough dance music to make a full 70 minute playlist; 2.) I don’t want to leave out all these other great noise rock bands I’ve heard recently.

So, I set out to create a playlist showing the similarity between electronic dance music and noise rock.

This is not this playlist.

It is, but it isn’t at all what I expected. I felt a little like Frankenstein the first time I listened to this whole playlist in the presence of my best friend (on the way to see YACHT in San Diego) because the first half of it is so good. I build up this great mood with all the dance music and then I upend the plane and noise dive the mood right into the ground at full speed. The last portion of this is almost an endurance battle to get through (especially when you finally hit the Wavves song, at which point I almost felt like screaming) if you’re not prepared for it… and nothing in this playlist prepares you for the last sequence of six or so songs.

As it is, and although this is the first playlist I’ve constructed that I’ll probably never randomly listen to (or at least it will be a while before I recover), I feel no need to change it. I accomplished what I wanted to do (build a playlist segueing from dance music to noise rock) and although it’s listenability is in question, I kind of love what I did here. Maybe you will too. Or at least you’ll enjoy it up until about track 17.

1. Holy Fuck – Frenchy’s
2. The xx – Crystalised
3. Spoon – Don’t You Evah
4. Harlem Shakes – Sunlight
5. Battles – Prismism (intermission)
6. Archie Bronson Outfit – Dead Funny
7. Electric Six – Down at McDonaldz
8. Friendly Fires – White Diamonds
9. YACHT – I’m in Love With a Ripper
10. Matt & Kim – Good Ol’ Fashion Nightmare
11. Red Wire Black Wire – Gold for its Weight
12. Passion Pit – Moth’s Wings
13. Delorean – Seasun
14. Dan Deacon – Paddling Ghost
15. Marnie Stern – Shea Stadium
16. Cloud Cult – Must Explore (intermission)
17. Parts & Labor – Prefix Free
18. Ponytail – Beg Waves
19. Wavves – No Hope Kids
20. Evangelicals – Skeleton Man
21. Swan Lake – Settle On Your Skin
22. Frog Eyes – Reform the Countryside
23. The Beatles – Her Majesty (closer)

Do yourself a favor before you listen (if you download it) and run some sort of Replaygain/Soundcheck/Normalization on this. I didn’t, and the noise rock tracks at the end tend to vary in volume from quiet (Swan Lake) to ridiculously loud (Wavves) so, in order to save your ears, auto-adjust the volume somehow.

Listen and Download @ http://driftedaway.staires.org

I had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Regina Spektor last night at the Greek Theatre. I’m not a fan of Spektor, in that I’ve never really sat down to listen to her music and every time it’s been recommended to me or that I’ve ran into someone who was a fan, it was usually someone whose taste was questionable and, to expose myself a little, some crazy woman I was dating whose taste was also questionable. I’m even guilty of speaking negatively of Spektor in order to mock a girlfriend or two, without having actually sat down to listen to any of her music.

In short, I’m a douche, and the last person you’d probably expect to show up to a Spektor concert. Hell, I was the last person I’d expect to wind up at one of her shows, but when my girlfriend (or pseudo-girlfriend, or soon-to-be-girlfriend-again, or special lady, or ‘just that girl who’s the only girl I’m supposed to put my penis in’) wound up with two tickets thanks to a spurned suitor and invited me, I couldn’t help but say yes. At the very least I’d spend an hour or so with a pretty lady I’d get to put my lips all over and, maybe, just maybe, listen to some tunes that don’t disgust me.

We got to the show a little late, probably missing a song or two. Regina Spektor was set up in front of piano, wearing an outfit that’d be best described as “over-sized black and white Alice in Wonderland attire” complete with a flat drawn bow at her breast and big puffy sleeves. She was backed by a string quartet and a drummer, used to great effect throughout the set but especially when they busted into a refrain from Guns ‘N Roses November Rain, at which point the strings soared, Regina’s hair went all over the place head bangin’ while pounding the keys, and I kind of shit myself over how incredible it was to hear one of the most emotive songs played live by a full string quartet and an obviously talented girl on piano. They didn’t play the whole song, just the important part, and with so much bombast that it made the hairs on my arm stand on end.

Even before I had a chance to listen to anything she was doing the crowd around me was exclaiming to each other, “She’s so adorable!” “OMFG she’s so cute!” These statements persisted throughout her entire set. Every time she opened her mouth the crowd erupted into cheers of jubilation, as if Regina Spektor was the most precious thing they’d ever witnessed in their entire lives.

…and it’s true, Regina Spektor is the most precious thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life. The first time I heard her speak she said, “I hope all our love up here is keeping you warm,” eliciting cheers from the audience. We were freezing, though I use the term freezing loosely because to us Los Angelinos anything below 68 is freezing cold. As it was, her love wasn’t keeping us warm, but judging by the general demeanor of the people around us, alcohol seemed to be doing the trick.

Speaking of: good lord drunk people are annoying. I don’t know what possesses people to go to a concert, get ridiculously drunk, and then try to carry on conversations as loudly as possible while such an obviously talented musician deserving of rapt attention is playing, but whatever it is should fuck off and die. The worst culprit was this drunk guy, who I’m pretty sure was gay or he was just so drunk that everything he said sounded gay, who insisted on shouting at the stage every 30 seconds and then turning to his uncomfortable looking female companion to yell something unintelligible at her. Eventually he got up and stood in the aisle behind us so he could be as drunk and loud as he wanted without pissing off everyone around him.

Down the aisle seated from us were two guys who also figured there was no better place to loudly carry on a conversation than at a Regina Spektor concert. I don’t know what they were saying, but one guy spent about 10 minutes shouting long strings of dialog at the guy next to him. Behind us was a group of women and gay men, including one guy who was probably in his early twenties who said that this was his first concert ever. (Proven, at the end of the show, when one of his female companions had to explain the encore process to him.) This group was guilty more than anyone else of repeatedly shouting, “She’s so adorable!” and “She’s so cute I just want to take her home with me!”

As a non-fan I owe it to Regina Spektor to say that she is pretty much incredible. I don’t see myself sitting around listening to her albums (unless I’m locking lips with my special lady) but to witness her play live was definitely one of the happiest accidents I’ve wandered into this year. Her ability to sing rapid-fire and bang on a chair with a drumstick (on “Poor Little Rich Boy”, a song that I felt was written vindictively at me by any number of ex-girlfriends) left me pretty much speechless. Her songwriting, when accessible, left me feeling kind of like I was entirely in love with her (on “That Time”, which she strummed on a guitar all alone on stage). The song “Blue Lips” left me feeling like I might burst into tears at any moment. She even sang a number that made several people get up and dance, though the name of that one I can’t locate—needless to say it had a good beat to it, find it on your own.

In short, Spektor ran the gamut. Sometimes her voice soared, sometimes it ran all the words together so quickly it could make your head spin, and sometimes she sounded meek and small, like a tiny mouse hiding in a corner waiting for the hammer to fall, but most of all her voice sold every single word sung by it. Someone behind me in the audience, one of the drunk women or gay men, spoke this idea aloud: she’s so damn sincere. Even when the words themselves don’t connect to you personally, the way she sings them pulls on your heart and mind. Not counting chair drumming, this is the thing that leaves the greatest impression on my mind and finds me wanting to see her live again.

The last thing I expected from Regina Spektor was that I’d leave the Greek Theatre with her voice in my head and in my heart, but I did. (Just writing this sentence and thinking about how moved I was at times makes me teary-eyed.) I might not run out and buy every single one of her records (because, to be honest, a couple of her slow songs/ballads left me a little cold) but I’d be cheating everyone if I didn’t say that you should go see her live if you have a chance. Even if you’re not a fan, Regina Spektor is an impeccable performer who seems to ooze talent out of every pore.

In short: boys, go with your girls.

(The first words out of my mouth at the show: “She’s like Amanda Palmer if Amanda Palmer had a vagina.”

To which my special lady replied, “That’s not nice, Amanda Palmer is boning Neil Gaiman after all.”

“Yeah, with her penis.”)

Just to get it out of the way: this Marnie Stern chick is fairly hot. This “fairly hotness” stacks with impressive guitar skill, chronic insomnia that adds that lunatic bent to her music—especially obvious on album opener Prime and parts of Ruler—and you wind up with a woman who I’ll describe now, instead, as super fucking hot.

Marnie Stern is super fucking hot. Her album, titled This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That, is fucking awesome all the way through. There isn’t a weak track on it, her songs range between a variety of styles and influences, all of it sounding distinctly her own but when she turns up the Hard Rock knob for The Crippled Jazzer it’s unmistakable and awesome.

Her songwriting is, for the most part, nonsense stream of consciousness garbage, but she admits to that in the first song. Her strength lies in combining great verses with hooks and riffs that sound like what she’s singing about feeling. A song like The Package is Wrapped demonstrates the great emotionality (I’m going to use this word to describe music forever and ever) of Marnie Stern’s music. Maybe I’m crazy, but I just connect to this song. The rolling “you rea-rea-range your mind” coupled with the funky sliding feeling of the verses, which is used to great effect at 2:57 right after “is there no way out of my mind?” to bring me quite possibly my favorite moment on the whole album. How it is that her singing “I see beautiful and shimmering signs” right after that is the greatest thing I’ve heard in a while, I don’t know, but it is.

This is an album full of great moments. The ‘ey! ‘ey! ‘ey!s on Ruler floor me every time. Or when Prime really kicks off and Marnie Stern’s voice and guitar seem to hit the exact same pitch and note and you’re not really sure if it’s Marnie singing or her guitar wailing. The chorus of Transformer, while sounding like a feminist anthem of some kind, is enlightening. When the rolls of Shea Stadium break into the first verse and it’s like clouds parting…

It just doesn’t get much better than this, people.

I love you, Marnie Stern. Even if you weren’t fairly hot I would love you.

Last night at Studio 15 Twenty (up the street from Amoeba) Noah and the Whale screened singer Charlie Fink’s film The First Days of Spring (which you get a copy of when you buy the deluxe 2 disc version of the album linked above) followed by a Q&A section with the band (Charlie Fink, Tom Hobden, & Matt Owens).

The screening was outside in a very well lit courtyard area surrounded by a cafe and a fashion clothing store. Much to my confusion the backdrop the projector screen was against was lit from the top by a row of fluorescent bulbs that were never shut off, washing out almost all of the blacks throughout the film, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that it was cold as hell. The crowd seemed to be mostly teenagers at first, including a girl dressed in overalls she’d fashioned into a skirt—a true Noah and the Whale devotee if I’d ever seen one, though I got the impression she had yet to listen to Spring, the album, since if she had she’d have known their new aesthetic is woe and not ironic hipster Wes Anderson inspired bittersweet joy… Ah, it’s true, the one thing you can be certain of about anything is that it will change.

The First Days of Spring, as an album, is a pretty sorrowful affair. Noah and the Whale’s first album was, and this goes almost entirely without saying, a fun filled romp through golden fields—at least until you started listening to the lyrics and realized every song was about something horrible (be it babies eaten by wolves, unrequited love carried until death, or internet romances turned sour). During the Q&A Hobden and Fink talked about the irony present on Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down and how Five Years Time was probably the most depressing song they’ve ever written but no one usually pays attention. (A fact, proven by my ex-girlfriend, who routinely berated me for “ruining” the song for her by pointing out the lyrical content.) Is nothing on Spring as depressing as Five Years Time? No, that shit is a lie.

When Charlie Fink was questioned about the motivation behind writing a full length break up album accompanied by what could be interpreted as an incredibly bleak film, he matter-of-factly stated that “My life is not at all interesting, I can assure you,” and completely dodged the question. You don’t have to go too far to find out Laura Marling, the female vocals heard on their first record, broke up with good ol’ Charlie and left him high and dry. Why, after writing an album and filming a movie about it, he still can’t talk about it, I don’t know. I guess we’re not all candid about our anguish.

Regardless of lyrics like “everything I love has gone away” and “This is the last song that I write while still in love with you” the album is quite pretty and not entirely not worth listening to over and over again. I was assuming that the film would be a film, so on the way to the screening I finally listened to Spring all the way through (recently having gone through a break up myself about a month or two ago, I was unable to get much past the first track without feeling like the torrential downpour of longing and loss was going to crush me). My summarized thoughts: pretty, sad, kind of boring at times, and almost shocking with how emotionally honest and upfront it is. The song Stranger, alone, kicks my ass in a lot of ways.

Little did I know that The First Days of Spring, the film itself, is essentially wordless and set entirely to the whole of the album. It’s not usual for me to groan at the idea of having to listen to an album back to back, but by the time the film progressed to track two I started to feel like I wanted to get up and leave, but remembering the single upbeat track on the album (Love of an Orchestra), I was wondering what Fink would have in store for that number.

The movie reeks of indie pastiche, and that’s even if it didn’t have a complete indie album as the score. We’ve got a lot of things here: a distorted time line, possibly intentionally misleading cuts, breaks in the fourth wall, absurd completely unreal occurrences—including, at one point, a grizzled old man in a suit dancing ridiculously to a firework display that emerges from behind him after the whole room he’s in splits in half (aforementioned Love Of An Orchestra number). At one point Fink seems to lift a scene, a feeling, straight out of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore—a movie that Noah and the Whale are vocal fans of (often signing their blog posts with “sic transit gloria”, a Rushmore reference), so it’s understandable I guess to lift a little here and there.

The story itself involves, and this is a big shocker (seriously), not the break up of a relationship but anguish of being stuck in one you want out of. (I don’t really understand the pairing of a break up album with a movie about desperately wanting to break up, but I suppose I’m not meant to.) The storyline is entirely non-linear for the most part, and I feel that describing the plot in any way would ruin it, but for the most part we view three “sections” of this guy Ethan’s life. Ethan’s a writer with a girlfriend who seems to be pregnant (though he unabashedly lights up cigarettes while sitting next to her on the couch) that he seems to hate with a passion that isn’t really explained in any way at all as you never see her be anything but pensive and kind. This is “Middle Ethan”.

There’s also “Young Ethan” and “Old Ethan” (the old man) who each seem to have their own little stories, neither of which I want to describe in the least because they’re the most interesting to watch unfold and try to understand on your own.

Charlie Fink said he wanted the movie to feel like a memory, and it some ways it does. It’s very dreamy, and the way the story is cut up into sections kind of keeps you guessing, but overall Spring isn’t very interesting. If you haven’t listened to the album yet, and want to experience it with some visual accompaniment, this isn’t a bad full-album music video. As a film, however, I can’t say I came away from the experience feeling much of anything about it. There’s wiggle room for interpretation (like: is “Old Ethan” simply the creation of Middle Ethan, the story he’s writing, or are we really being shown his miserable stupid future as an old man?) but overall it’s all pretty cut and dry and the unanswered questions (“Why’s the super pretty girlfriend dead?”) stay completely unanswered.

Hopefully my incoherent ramblings give you a general idea of what to expect. I didn’t know what to expect and I was slightly disappointed—as disappointed as you can be when you go see a free movie screening and sit in an uncomfortable woven beach chair for over two hours, which isn’t much.

Before the film they showed a ‘short film’ beginning with animation by a guy who’s name I can’t remember, which segued into a Brooklyn (or was it New York?) apartment show Noah and the Whale played. In it they seamlessly transition between several songs off Spring, shifting the arrangements and instrumentation of them so they almost sound like new but familiar songs. The whole thing is beautifully shot, framed, & performed, and the ‘audience’ of pretty girls and guys smoking cigarettes & lazing around on couches behind them adds a certain emotional dynamic to the performance—at one point the camera catches a girl reach out and rub her boyfriends leg while Charlie Fink sings a romantic line that I can’t remember right now and the moment is tender, completely genuine, and totally moving. All in all I’d say I enjoyed this more than the full-length film shown afterward, and I’d definitely show it to anyone looking for a “primer” on Noah and the Whale’s new album. (If I find a copy online I’ll post it to the Twitter account.)

Song Note: I assumed I’d already posted the song The First Days of Spring, but I haven’t. It should accompany this post, but it doesn’t.

Site Note: I haven’t posted any new music in a while and I’m sorry. I have a backlog I need to motor through but things have been so benign for me lately that the inspiration is lacking. I’ve got songs but no words. I’ll get on it.

I don’t know who Tom Tom Club are but their name is thrown around enough in the very few reviews of this on Amazon that I’m going to assume that YACHT sounds a lot like them. Take that with you, put it in your pocket, remind me to look into Tom Tom Club sometime—though I have a really good feeling I won’t actually like this ‘style’ of music when it’s actually from the 80′s itself.

One thing I do know is that this The Afterlife song has that B-52′s vibe like whoa. It doesn’t take a genius to point this one out, though. I’m not a fan of the B-52′s (and it’s really hard now that Family Guy has sufficiently ruined Rock Lobster for me) but The Afterlife was the first song on YACHT’s album that really caught me.

From there it was only natural that I’m In Love With A Ripper would be the next song to grow on me. I love it more, now, than The Afterlife. I spent most of yesterday with this song stuck in my head and listening to it was no relief, I just wanted to listen to it again and again. I played it in Audiosurf and it was awesome even on that.

The rest of the album isn’t as good as these two songs but it’s pretty close. With the exception of the last track, an ‘a capella’ version’ of Psychic City meant, apparently, to demonstrate how poorly Claire L. Evans can sing when she tries hard enough, See Mystery Lights almost seems like a perfect album for a variety of situations… late night drives, summer afternoon drives, dweeby parties, sleepy time wind down… This album can do it all, I think.

Just edit out that last track. I also don’t know why the regular version of Psychic City is the most popular song off this album on iTunes. Are people nuts?