Spiritualized
Radio City Music Hall
Friday, July 30

Jason Pierce sits on a chair at stage left in Radio City Music Hall in front of a backdrop of hi-watt stars with what looks to be 29 other people. He wears white, says nothing, and only gets up from his chair once, to leave. The onstage excess includes two other guitarists, a robed gospel choir, and a guy playing kettledrum and little cymbals to ensure the live performance has as much gratuitous boom and crash as the music does on record. Radio City Music Hall seems only semi-prepared for how loud everything is.

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Faith No More
East River State Park
Friday, July 2

We are gathered here this evening with our backs to the sunset to watch a reunited Faith No More play the East River State Park, a former shipping dock in Williamsburg consisting of seven mostly un-shaded acres, part concrete slab, part lawn, part Juicy Juice-sponsored playground. At the water's edge, there's a beach about three feet deep. A proud representative from the Open Space Alliance informs us that this is now the largest outdoor venue in New York City. So there are at least two big deals to think about: FNM's first East Coast show in more than ten years, and the fact that it's happening in Williamsburg, a neighborhood whose local culture flowered in part out of an ideological rejection of stuff like $45-ticket hard-rock shows where the beer tickets and the beer are kept under separate tents.

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​You may have noticed that Zach and Camille--SOTC's daily stewards--aren't posting today, because they're on some kind of spiritual retreat that I'm not privy to the details of. As a guest, I'd be remiss in not writing an amorphous think piece that will fall through the cracks between more web-ready tidbits like "New Rolling Stones Song Exists" and "Something Is Not Safe For Work." jj's cover of "Birthday Sex" offers just such an opportunity.

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​Houston rapper Devin the Dude has a new album out today, and it is streaming on his Myspace page. It is called Suite #420. I doubt I have to explain to you what the title means.

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After a battle with cancer, a heart attack in February, and surgery in March, Gang Starr and Jazzamatazz rapper Guru, born Keith Elam, died yesterday morning at 43. "I write this with tears in my eyes, not of sorrow but of joy for what a wonderful life I have enjoyed and how many great people I have had the pleasure of meeting," reads part of a statement purportedly written on his deathbed and provided by his partner, Solar.

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​A few weeks ago, the music writer Dave Tompkins took a podium in one of NYU's many windowless annexes to promote his upcoming book, How To Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop. Behind him was a still from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms frozen on the projector screen. In front of him, he displayed a record called You're a Peachtree Freak on Peachtree Street. A typical aside: "You hear a lot of that from crypto-engineers from World War II." A typical setup: "Hey, this is my brother's '69 Camaro." [laughter] "No. This is important."

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Trouble & Bass featuring Joker, Nomad, and Bok Bok & L-Vis 1990
Santos Party House
Saturday, November 21

Joker's hypeman MC Nomad wants to know if the audience can FEEL IT IN THE RIBCAGE, which the audience, arms raised, responds to with a loud, slurry sound. By the looks of the floor, the ribcage isn't the only place people are feeling it, and the bass isn't the only thing they're feeling.

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The Raincoats, Soft Power, Viv Albertine
Knitting Factory
Friday, October 16

The Raincoats can't play their instruments any more professionally than they could 30 years ago, which is a relief. The band's sound was predicated on sacred simplicity anyway: Punk, sort of, but more like knotted folk-rock, full of thuds and chops, fraying at the edges. Guitar, bass, violin, drums. No pedals, no fuzz, no glitter. Four women (tonight, there's one man, filling in for first-gen drummer Palmolive). It's playful music, sometimes even child-like, but never cute. Onstage, they radiate joy without smiling much--you can see it in their body language, they way they drift toward each other and then fall away into their own corners.

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Rebecca Smeyne

Kutsher's, the land of impossible indie-music dreams

Yeah, so All Tomorrow's Parties New York. It happened this past weekend upstate and it was epic. Nick Cave played piano with the Dirty Three, who did Ocean Songs in its entirety. David Cross got so hammered Friday he could barely tell jokes. ("My goodness, fuckin' Jameson, though," he said at one poine when he went blank.) Boredoms' nine-drummer ceremonial-offering-like salvo went so far over their 75-minute time, stagehands started dismantling their kits while the drummers were still bashing away. Brooklyn's very own Oneida led a 12-hour improv jam session in a corner bar that'd been temporarily renamed the Oneida Sportsman Lounge, a fusty room that smelled, as one colleague put it, "like my mom's pants." Steve Albini, for the second year in a row, ran a poker-room that was open to anyone with ten bucks. Jim Jarmusch spoke to a tiny packed room and said things like, "When I get depressed, [I just] think of all the music I haven't heard." Crystal Castles' Sharpie-eyelined front-writher Alice did not punch anyone in the face. No Age cycled through Husker Du songs with Bob Mould; Deerhunter's Bradford Cox joined the trio for a cover of Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers' "Chinese Rocks." The Flaming Lips emerged on Sunday night through an LCD birth canal; Wayne Coyne crowd-surfed, per usual, in a plastic bubble. Later, Bob Mould DJ'd in the Oneida room and Bradford Cox hosted an impromptu, acoustic lakeside jam. It was, let's repeat, epic.

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In a Fader TV spot from last June, Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons mentioned that "The last two shows I played in New York, I'd hand somebody a rock and they'd say 'Oh no no, not for me,' and I'd be like, 'It's just a rock.'" Maybe you've been in this situation: A skinny, clear-eyed androgyne hands you a rock, and you are supposed to surrender to the tide of creativity welling inside your heart. So you get the bell or the rock or whatever it is and you make some quiet gesture with it. When you realize nobody has made fun of you, you do it again, louder. Then you look next to you and see that actually, someone else has a bell or a rock, and they're making some gesture with it too, and they're smiling.

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