Naturally, this dude is involved

​Distilling a full year of furtive, easily distracted, constantly overwhelmed listening down to a mere 10 albums is a ridiculous, agonizing, thoroughly loathsome undertaking, and yet here we all are, pulling nine fully formed sonic universes together and capping it off with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, because that's what we all did in 2010. Try Warpaint's morose "Undertow" when you want to feel sorry for yourself, Sleigh Bells' spectacularly violent "Straight A's" when you want to feel sorry for whoever you're about to punch in the face, and the morosely spectacular "Runaway" when you want to feel sorry for, well, Kanye. This was my year, with all the distractions finally, mercifully filtered out.

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Not kidding about the hirsute thing. PIcs by Santiago Felipe.

​Local Natives
Bowery Ballroom
Thursday, May 6

Your eyes are drawn immediately to the one dude's mustache, a prime accordion-playing/fire-flower-acquiring/bowling-pin-juggling/olde-tyme-bathing-suit-wearing juggernaut, a profound specimen of facial hair in a crowd that knows from same. But otherwise L.A.'s Local Natives are a true collective, no leader and no focal point, a five-man, instrument-swapping whirlwind of jerky guitars, pounding tom drums, and white-funk bass, veering from complex and disarmingly pretty four-part vocal harmonies to Arcade Fire-style en masse shouting. They are way better at all this than you'd expect, though. Put it this way: They do a sad, nervously elegant version of Talking Heads' "Warning Sign," and I, a guy so protective of that particular NYC institution that I once offered to personally pay a local Northern California band $20 if they promised never to cover Talking Heads again, totally approve. ("BAMF"?)

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