Mid-'90s emo institution The Promise Ring announced last year that they'd reunite to play a few scattered shows throughout 2012. The band, in its early days, combined the noisy and particulate ideas of guitarist/singer Davey von Bohlen's previous band Cap'n Jazz with more traditional punk constructions. There's a kind of insistent, environmental appeal to the style, demonstrated in songs like "Everywhere in Denver" and "Why Did We Ever Meet?", which feel like an onrush of water.

Before their breakup in 2002, the band released Wood/Water, an album on which they became suddenly expansive and observant, to the perceivable confusion of fans. The band will perform at the Bamboozle on Saturday and at Irving Plaza on Sunday, and The Village Voice spoke with drummer Dan Didier about the nature of the reunion as well as how Wood/Water has evolved in the estimation of Promise Ring fans.

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Say Anything
Best Buy Theater
Friday, April 13

Better than: So what say you/ and all your friends/ step up to my friends/ in the alley tonight/ yeah.

On Friday night, Say Anything ended their encore with two songs of the same name: "Admit It." The first, from Say Anything's 2004 record ... is a Real Boy, and the second, from their 2012 record Anarchy, My Dear, both contain the sort of wild, mean rhetoric that seeks to character-assassinate the "hipster," or the idea of a hipster, or just someone whose outward projections seem calculated in the cynical. It's practically spoken-word: "Despite your pseudo-bohemian appearance and vaguely leftist doctrine of beliefs/ you know nothing about art or sex that you couldn't read in any trendy New York underground fashion magazine." All of the details and signifiers singer Max Bemis gibbers through ultimately form a kind of cipher, a thing that only reflexively defines Bemis. It doesn't matter if there's a demonstrable person at the end of the song. It's more an ethos than total enmity. The final verse, where Bemis turns the mirror on himself, locks the song into perspective, newly full of a kind of twisted pathos: "Well, let me tell you this/ I am shamelessly self-involved/ I spend hours in front of the mirror making my hair elegantly disheveled."

The new "Admit It," which is actually titled "Admit it Again," seems curiously oriented toward critics, and there is no reflective verse, no object in a mirror, just mean facelessness. Here Bemis is the cipher, yelling needlessly at people who will probably never listen to the song. (One line seems transparently aimed toward, um, a music-reviewing website: "Defining your own self-worth by the opinion of a stupid website with Satan as its figurehead.") It plods musically; where the first "Admit It" nearly rushes by you, the new one dully paces around. Arranged together, in concert, you could witness a band's slow decline in a kind of hyperspeed, time unfurling. Besides, early in the newer song, Bemis sings, "Don't want to hear about how the latest Rihanna single is a postmodern masterpiece," which I choose to take personally.

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Jesse Untract-Oakner

Lil B at the New Museum.

Lil B
The New Museum
Thursday, April 12

Better than: Quietly contemplating a painting.

1. In the small downstairs theater of the New Museum, a projector's light beams onto Lil B, building his shadow. A camera drifts with him from behind, following him in a light trails. It brings the otherwise undecorated space into a soft, bluish focus, B floating coolly through it. There's little distance between B and the crowd, just a small disparity in the altitude of the stage. He sweeps his hands over the front row as if to pull them closer. As with his lecture at NYU, he empowers the audience, but this time in a different, more physical way. In the prolonged coda of the show, as arrhythmic keyboard washes spread thinly from the lone PA, he tells the crowd, "Just close your eyes and trust everybody in the building. We all good."

2. He lapses between songs into "based" freestyles, which are sort of relaxed, unpressured word streams. "I keep my head down/ I'm walking hopeless/ Every day I keep my mind open/ Third eye open/ I'm dope/ I don't believe in Illuminati/ I don't believe in nothing/ I believe in people."

3. He announces two different upcoming releases: A single from his cat Keke, and a new "classical" album from The BasedGod, who produced the album Rain in England in dense, untethered synths structured around the refrain of "Three Blind Mice." Lil B will not rap over The BasedGod's album. He speaks briefly about California Boy, his upcoming rock album, in a monologue otherwise about Axl Rose. "Why didn't he want to be included in the Hall of Fame?" B asks. "I rock with Axl, man. I'm an old-school Guns N' Roses fan."

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Lil B (lecture)
Eisner & Lubin Auditorium, NYU
Wednesday, April 11

Better than: College.

Lil B walks onto the stage of the Eisner & Lubin Auditorium in a dayglo yellow shirt, which combats for brightness with the stage lights. Those first images you get when you stare at the sun and then close your eyes, the infrared shapes that blossom behind your eyelids? It's as if they'd swollen into shirt form. A scarf draped around his neck is patterned with more tender blondes and greens, and his Vans are firmly aged into a sandy brown, evenly unwashed. It's like staring into an optical illusion: B moves and the light shifts around him. Elemental synths issue from the speakers, gently recalling the sound of his 2010 album Rain in England. It's like a cloud hugging you in the sunlight, warm and enveloping. NYU provides him with a long, clinically-shaped table, on which he leans or illustrates his sleeping patterns. "Nyah, honesty, integrity, loyalty, passion, friendship," go his quixotic naps.

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Editor's Note: Tomorrow night, Lil B is speaking at NYU; yesterday afternoon, he released a mixtape that he said was required listening for the students attending his lecture. We had Brad Nelson, the Lil B scholar who will cover tomorrow's lecture and Lil B's Thursday night performance at the New Museum, chronicle his first reactions to the tape.

At the start of The Basedprint II, the new mixtape by Lil B, he advises us that there's "no need for volume one." On the cover he is hastily photoshopped over Jay-Z, edges widely lassoed, triangles of background newly part of the face. He employed a similar deconstruction of classic hip-hop album art on White Flame, with his smiling absorption of Soulja Slim's Give it 2 'Em Raw. On the cover of Silent President he launched a rendered, golden profile of himself into the ornate and regal teeth of Watch the Throne.

Lil B usually deals in interpolation, from hip-hop and other forms, but the signal-to-noise ratio is always slightly off, misshapen. I'm Gay, his 2011 album, is a tonally straightforward backpack rap album—soul samples, choking strings, rapping as slow darts of consciousness—that, for a song called "I Hate Myself," lands on a gravitationally slowed sample of "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls.

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Jandek
Vaudeville Park
Monday, March 26

Better than: I don't know, a seance probably?

Jandek played marimba stiffly, percussively, as if trying to repair the instrument musically. His face seemed in a muscular freeze, half-absorbed by beard. Vaudeville Park, an apartment-sized performance space in Williamsburg, was lit in such a way that it maximized the shadows of the performers, doubling and tripling them—Jandek's hunched migrations across the marimba, moving into the small jumps of guitarist Alan Lewandoski, flickering, one shadow deepening the next, grading darknesses. Bassist Michael Hafftka grinned every few minutes, widening pearl, finding joy in the deep tangles. Two cameras, set on each side of the band, filmed the show on Panasonic Omnivision VHS.

Jandek started playing shows in 2004, after 26 years of strange, untuned recordings. His 68 records feature an expression that seems to have passed through a few layers; you hear a voice and amusical strumming, and the whole affair sounds as if haunted into the record. A band plays on some of the recordings, but the aloneness of the sparer Jandek records is so intimate that the albums seem less recorded and pressed than pulled directly from the person. There's an anti-intimacy to it, though. There's no available Jandek narrative, no imaginative way to think of it as the sound of a person unlocking themselves from sanity. There's just dissonance, arranged slightly, distantly. There's a man, his songs and his photos, floating just beyond context.

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School of Seven Bells
Mercury Lounge
Tuesday, February 28

Better than: Melting.

School of Seven Bells played an early show at the Mercury Lounge Tuesday night, in celebration of the release of their new record Ghostory (Vagrant). The members of the band shared a mood of of pride and awe. "We're so happy to be here," said guitarist Benjamin Curtis, in semi-exhausted thanks. "If I were more articulate I could tell you why."

Curtis is perhaps lacking in the lucidity department, but the his band's music takes care of that for him. He clung to his guitar all night, electronic textures being faxed in from elsewhere. He strummed in an insistent, shoegazey way—guitar as weather, while the vocals of Alejandra Deheza seemed floated in from another music. They don't quite fit in with or react to the New Order-ish escalations; they're all solid notes, at odds with the sometimes vaporous sounds surrounding them. But it's from this uneven transaction that the music pulls its emotional heft.

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Jack's Mannequin w/Allen Stone, Jukebox The Ghost
Irving Plaza
Wednesday, February 8

Better than: The $7 Bud Lights on sale, marketed generically and dimensionally as "12oz beer." Cool story, Irving Plaza!

People were packed into the helpless rectangle of Irving Plaza, walled off from the stage by a barricade and a thin photo pit yet still within intimate distance. Jack's Mannequin frontman and pianist Andrew McMahon said a few times during the night that he chose to play at Irving Plaza because of the closeness of the stage to the crowd. I was in the photo pit for the first song; within seconds McMahon had leaped over me to the barricade, where he could selectively merge with the crowd.

That was a connective element to the show: McMahon's ecstatic leaping. From his chair, onto his piano, into the angled arms of fans, with a weird exactness. Otherwise he was gliding insanely along his piano as if the two movements were interrelated. McMahon's music has a grounding warmth, even while it is manic. There's a feeling of home, of being understood by a familiar place; all the while McMahon darts through hooks. When spotlights retreated from the stage, the musicians were mostly amplified by modest lamplight, one over McMahon's piano, another behind bassist Mikey "The Kid" Wagner, implying the warmth of home.

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To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. Here, Brad Nelson talks about the much-discussed collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, Lulu, which topped his ballot and came in at No. 94 on the albums poll.

In the video we see the four members of Metallica, in autonomous cars, approaching a warehouse in the Bay Area, where (this is the only real narrative to take from the video) Lou Reed is waiting. Lou approaches nothing; he has always been there, in front of a microphone, phasing out of shape. There is not much light but the few spotlights amplify beyond their scope, drawing implications into the face of Lars Ulrich, whose mouth diagonally frames his teeth, always, and the whole skull of James Hetfield, newly dynamic with mohawk. Kirk Hammett's guitar looks changed in the light, full of grain. They play. They play a lumbering riff, it seems pulled from a subspace. Gravity acts gently there, woozily. Lou speaks, barks, commanding something from afar. They all start to phase, faces play upon faces. Their images shake into each other, confuse features. They are completely fused in spirit. Lou rubs his eyes. Rob Truijillo tosses his long, weighty hair into glossy octagons of light.

This is the Darren Aronofsky-directed video for "The View," the ostensible single from the recorded exchange between Lou Reed and Metallica called Lulu. People treated Lulu supernaturally when news of it first appeared; when it was released it was the absurd, unapproachable record of the year, roundly panned, roundly existentially questioned. In the Quietus, Julian Marszalek wrote, "We have but a short period on this earth." It could not sustain Lulu, the indulgence of five men who had advanced into a totally sealed-off sphere. How much of what they did was metal? How much of it followed the track of the Velvet Underground, into an unforming rock? Most declared neither, that Lulu sounded as if two incomplete records had grafted intemperately to each other. I don't even totally have the words to process it now, even as it tops my Pazz and Jop ballot.

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Jonathan Toubin Benefit Show: Chain And The Gang, 5 Dollar Priest, Eleanor Friedberger, Nicole Atkins, Dorit Chrysler and theremin, Shilpa Ray, An American Dream, TWO TEARS
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Thursday, January 12

Jonathan Toubin plays rock and soul records, but unfamiliar ones, songs that have disentangled from the larger narrative. Simple, driving music, on its own. "The rock and roll people weren't dancing at all in New York at the time and the club people were just playing music I don't like," Toubin says in a short documentary about his DJ series, New York Night Train. So he found a space in the middle, playing unknown records so that people can newly resonate with them. "I really just want to play any kind of music that's really raw and immediate," he says in the same documentary.

On December 8, Toubin was scheduled to DJ in a southeast Portland club. That morning, a taxi cab crashed into Toubin's hotel room and pinned Toubin against a wall. Portland Officer Stuart Palmiter, interviewed by the Oregonian, described Toubin as "literally pinned under the front of the car."

He has since recovered, speedily—he was discharged from the hospital on Friday, and is reportedly far ahead of the pace doctors thought he'd take—and on Thursday night, friends of his in the music community threw a benefit show for him, complete with a raffle where one of the prizes was a portrait of the man himself.

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