Jamming up north not too long ago.

Joanna Newsom
Town Hall
Thursday, March 18

"Did you say, 'Play faster?' she asks. "No! Fantastic!" replies one of several hundred rapt, lusting, audience-bound gentlemen. Thought so.

The National
The Bell House
Thursday, March 11

"We're gonna play a couple of new songs...flawlessly," National frontman Matt Berninger laughed, standing onstage at the Bell House last night for the first of two short-notice, "secret" shows in Brooklyn this week. Which they did. The kicker, of course, was when Berninger proceeded to forget an entire verse to 2007's radio-friendly "Start a War." "What? It's an old song," he said nervously, glass of wine in hand. Kinda. After 2007's Boxer debuted to nearly unanimous critical praise, the National toured the album, and then dabbled in various projects (Dark Was The Night; a performance collaboration at BAM) that only served to drum up anticipation for new material. A week ago, the band finally announced their first new album in three years--High Violet, out in May--debuted one of the songs from it ("Terrible Love") in a casual performance on late night television, and announced two shows at a 350 max capacity venue in Brooklyn that sold out in less than a minute. The crowd knew what they were getting into: mostly new material from Violet, with a few of the last two albums' essential moments dropped between. In total, 11 new songs were played, eight of which had never been played in concert before.

Way more enthusiasm at this show, unfortunately.

Yelawolf
Brooklyn Bowl
Monday, March 8

Let us now spend a brisk, unsatisfying, Fader-sponsored 20 minutes with the mixtape rapper of the moment, a spry Alabaman gent who's a dead ringer for Pretty Hate Machine-era Trent Reznor, boasts a nasally staccato flow you'd almost call "Anticon-esque" if you didn't particularly value your life, and at the moment seems dismayed at a crowd whose vigor and enthusiasm is pretty much standard issue for a show with no cover charge, on a Monday night, in a bowling alley. "If you love Chevrolets, make some noise!" he commands; this goes over about as well as "Everybody yell GET 'ER DONE!" He deserves better than he gets and will presumably get it some other time.

Titus Andronicus
Bowery Ballroom
Saturday, March 6

OK, so--in retrospect, no surprise that The Monitor, the messiest, most convoluted and ambitious concept-album cum punk-opera since American Idiot (if not Sandinista!), doesn't exactly translate seamlessly to a Bowery Ballroom stage. Even less so with Titus Andronicus, the band that made the record, at the controls: chief songwriter, mouthpiece, and all-around firebrand frontman Patrick Stickles noted more than once that two of the five members of his band had only joined within the quintet's last three shows; as for bassist Ian Graetzer, well--"He just did our taxes," Stickles boasted. The point being that the band and their shockingly good sophomore record boil down to one guy, and god forbid if he's been drinking or nervous or whatever else.

​"I wanna see all my friends at once!" screams a vocalist on Arthur Russell's "Go Bang". It's a line that might ultimately define the man - a musical genius of the glory days of disco who seemed to be loved, even pined after, by all who knew him. The feeling couldn't have been any more apparent than at the emotional Electric Minds tribute to the man last night at Santos, at which the surviving members of Russell's disco projects Loose Joints and Dinosaur L performed his tracks live.

Russell's most important work, for us at least, came when he moved to NYC and became the coordinator for the Kitchen - a creative roosting place for composers and instrumentalists - where he would meet and eventually collaborate with an avant-garde elite (Phillip Glass and David Byrne included). He had spent his youth cavorting with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and John Cage (while studying at the Ali Akbar Khan School of music in San Francisco; later, the young composer grew to be a playboy in the underground disco scene, gaining notoriety for his unique take on the genre and his entourage of nightlife's disco kings. Most fascinating was the fact that his peers put up with him at all. He often dropped projects mid-way (including an opera for Robert Wilson, later saved by Glass), respectfully declined to work with John Hammond (Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Aretha Franklin's producer), and sometimes created so many versions of the same track that the end result was confused or went un-recorded. Not to mention his many romantic entanglements, some of which led to the poetry that served as his lyrics. In all, Russell was an innovative composer and musical virtuoso whose unique strengths and weaknesses combined to make him both adored and, for all intents and purposes, unknown.

Twitpic via joe_saturday

​The Dirty Projectors
Allen Room, Lincoln Center
Friday, February 19

The Allen Room's dazzling floor-to-ceiling glass vista is guaranteed to metaphorically enhance whatever you happen to hear there. Case in point: On Friday night those double layered panels refracted 59th Street into a boggling twilight boogie-woogie of car headlights ascending the face of nearby skyscrapers. It was an image perfectly suited to the cubist strategies employed in Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address, which the sextet performed in collaboration with the fourteen-piece Alarm Will Sound Ensemble as part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series (sponsored by Pfizer). Movin' on up, indeed.

Mumford & Sons
Bowery Ballroom
Thursday, February 18

"You can't clap for shit, man," notes Marcus Mumford with a grin, and verily are the Bowery Ballroom faithful's attempts at audience participation fairly disastrous -- no rhythm, no timing, no hope. In truth our enthusiasm almost completely derails another of Mumford & Sons' (by available visual evidence this quartet's name is a joke) robust Brit power-folk anthems, but Marcus' forceful bellow cuts expertly through the clatter. Dude is raspy. "I'm sorrrrrrrry," he intones, like a chainsaw cutting a bus in half. He must be talking to his lungs.

Try this one, it's called "Slow Jam," for very good reason.

Four Tet
Le Poisson Rouge
Wednesday, February 18

People used to call Kieran Hebden's preferred style "folktronica," and for that he deserves a sincere, groveling apology. Everyone does. It made slightly more sense back in 2003, when Rounds, his third release as Four Tet, revealed itself as a world-class driving-across-a-famous-bridge-and-enjoying-the-view record, delicately mingling the robotic and the pastoral, digital sunrises and digital sunsets. Hard, insistent electronic beats mingled with chopped-up pieces of what sounded suspiciously like acoustic guitars, music boxes, harps, mandolins. "As Serious as Your Life" paired a lithe funk bassline with... an autoharp? Could it be? And why not? He plays it tonight at LPR, roundabouts 1:15 a.m. or so, and the sold-out crowd goes (demurely) nuts.

Ed Banger Records Seventh Anniversary
Terminal 5
Friday, February 12

Those of us that remember when "Pop the Glock" came out--all the way back in 2006-- were eagerly awaiting some sort of Ke$ha-themed diatribe from Uffie last Friday night. The Parisian rapper was one of the "surprise guests" at the Ed Banger anniversary show at Terminal 5, adorning a lineup that also featured Justice, Busy P, DJ Mehdi, and Breakbot. While the label celebrated their seventh birthday to a sold-out show of 17-year-old glowstick-bearing fans, we waited patiently for Uffie to reassert her claim as the #1 rapping white female in the game. After all, this is the girl who wrote an entire diss track about an internet messageboard.

A still from Andy Warhol's Blow Job

​Carl Craig and nsi.
Unsound Festival
Lincoln Center
Friday, February 5

The Thursday night opening ceremonies for the Polish Unsound Festival at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center confused and delighted an audience of both Upper West Side neighborhood folk and deep electronic music fans. Finnish electronic producer Vladislav Delay abstracted electronic splashes alongside Berliner VJ Lillevan's projections before producer Sebastian Meissner and Polish avant-garde classic quartet Kwartludium re-imagined Cali hardcore punk label SST as mesmeric classical music. No mosh pit broke out.