​L'Arc-en-Ciel
Madison Square Garden
Sunday, March 25

Better than: Hearing critics just talk about weird foreign scenes and stylistic blends and collisions at the EMP Pop Conference.

Japanese hard rock band L'Arc-en-Ciel have been in well-deserved self-celebration mode of late. They celebrated their 20th anniversary with the 2011 triple-disc best-of Twenity, then announced their first U.S. concert in nearly eight years (they'd made their Stateside performance debut at 2004's Otakon anime convention in Baltimore). Originally booked for the Theater at Madison Square Garden, this show was bumped up to the main arena due to demand. And while it wasn't a total sellout, it was damn close. The audience, though predominantly Asian, included folks of every race and color, many of whom doubtless didn't know a word of Japanese and/or first heard L'Arc via games or anime soundtracks (their songs have served as themes for Fullmetal Alchemist and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, among others). I saw a Mexican flag and a Venezuelan flag being waved on the floor at various points.

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Bill Bernstein/via Facebook

​Guitarist Vernon Reid is best known as the leader of the hard rock/metal band Living Colour. Before that, though, he was a fixture on the New York avant-garde scene, blending rock, jazz and noise as a member of drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, duetting with Bill Frisell on the album Smash & Scatteration, and co-founding the Black Rock Coalition, among many other things. He's released multiple solo albums (the first of which, 1996's Mistaken Identity, is the only album to credit both Teo Macero and Prince Paul as producers), and, this month, is premiering a multimedia performance piece, Artificial Afrika: A Tale of Lost Cities, at Dixon Place. The piece combines music and videos by Reid with contributions from DJ Leon Lamont and African vocalist Akim Funk Buddha.

In late January, I got Reid on the phone to ask about the project, its inspirations, and more.

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​A Spotify playlist of Sam Rivers' work is here.

Jazz composer, multi-instrumentalist, and organizer Sam Rivers died of pneumonia on December 26. Rivers' importance to the American jazz avant-garde extended beyond his recordings and performances. In his demonstration of artistic self-reliance and community-building with his Bond Street loft space Studio RivBea, Rivers (who mostly played saxophone and flute, though he did also play piano) set an example for modern events like the annual Vision Festival; his willingness, even eagerness, to play with musicians decades younger than himself provided a bridge between generations that has always been crucial to jazz's development as an art and a culture.

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M. Sharkey

​The powerhouse NYC quartet Pistolera started out meshing uptempo, Latin party music with politically engaged lyrics, but on their third release El Desierto y la Ciudad (Luchadora), they shift into a more atmospheric mode, offering a suite of songs meant to be heard in sequence and all together. Lead singer Sandra Velasquez talked about the album with us over email while on the road.

What's the single biggest musical change between your previous releases and this one, in your mind?

Our first two albums kind of branded the band as being a Latin party band with political lyrics. With this album, we move away from that. This album is a concept album, about a journey between the deserts of the West and New York City. It is meant to be listened to from beginning to end and was recorded with the idea that it was a soundtrack. There are interludes that escort the listener along the journey.

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Egypt-born visual artist Nader Sadek has been bringing the worlds of avant-garde art and extreme metal together for several years. His 2007 installation Faceless arose out of his experiences living as a metalhead in Cairo, and combined oddly Edward Gorey-ish drawings of a niqab-clad woman standing in landscapes not unlike the ones you might see on metal album covers or fantasy novels. The soundtrack to the piece had members of Morbid Angel, Emperor, Obituary and Testament performing an experimental piece that mixed death metal and Middle Eastern music alongside Middle Eastern musicians like Omar Faruk Tekbilek and Raquy Danziger. Sadek has also designed costumes and sets for the likes of Mayhem and Attila Csihar.

This week Sadek releases his first full-length album, In the Flesh (Season of Mist). His collaborators include former Morbid Angel vocalist Steve Tucker, Mayhem guitarist Rune "Blasphemer" Eriksen and Cryptopsy drummer Flo Mounier; Csihar and Cattle Decapitation's Travis Ryan contribute vocals to the record, while Morbid Angel's Thor Myhren, Mike Lerner of Behold...the Arctopus, and Tony Norman (formerly of Monstrosity) perform guitar solos. Sadek is planning to make videos for every track on the album; the first one, for "Nigredo in Necromance," is above.

Sound of the City spoke with Sadek by phone on Monday.

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​Calle 13
Irving Plaza
Friday, May 6

Sure, they came onstage 45 minutes later than advertised, but the crowd was only a little grumpy about being kept waiting. (Those who booed and threw empty beer cans and plastic cups at Irving Plaza's hanging video screen every time a new song came over the PA were outnumbered by those who chanted "tre-ce, tre-ce, tre-ce" and waved giant Puerto Rican flags.) And within moments of their arrival on stage, Calle 13 had a nearly sold-out club in the palms of their hands.

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Singing (and drinking) you under the table. Pics by Phil, more below.

​Vicente Fernández
Madison Square Garden
Saturday, October 16

Better Than: Anything you'll hear at CMJ this week.

Vicente Fernández, the undisputed king of Mexican ranchera music, has a guy whose entire job is to keep his drink filled. Toward the back of the stage at his sold-out Madison Square Garden show Saturday night, there was a small table holding a white hand towel, a plastic cup of water, and a second plastic cup holding a sip or two of dark, amber liquid. At stage right, a man in a leather jacket kept an eagle eye on that second cup, and every time Fernández picked it up and walked away with it to toast the crowd between verses, his helper put a new one in its place.

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Another time at MSG

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Buddy Guy
Madison Square Garden
July 28, 2010

Tom Petty looks like an anorexic monkey, and his voice is so nasal it makes Bob Dylan sound like a death-metal grunter. But he's a hell of a songwriter, and the Heartbreakers are one of the two or three best bands in rock, particularly in concert. They've retained almost the same lineup since 1975--the only changes have been in the drum and bass slots, plus the addition of multi-instrumentalist Scott Thurston at the dawn of the '90s. Their 2009 Live Anthology, which bundled recordings from as far back as 1980 and as recent as 2006 into what felt like one astonishing show, provided ample evidence of their power. And their new album Mojo hammers the lesson home, having been recorded more or less live in the studio. Petty and company are pushing Mojo hard; if you bought a ticket to Wednesday night's nearly sold-out show, you got a free download of the album, and they offered a solid encapsulation of the record onstage, playing five of its 15 tracks in a row mid-set.

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Dude looks pretty stressed out

​Most American listeners probably know Brazilian singer-songwriter Seu Jorge as the soft-spoken dude singing David Bowie covers in Portuguese in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. He's also acted in City of God and alongside Brian Cox in the 2008 prison-break movie The Escapist. His latest musical project, though, is a radically different affair.

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Isis earlier this month, letting it all go.

Isis/Melvins/Totimoshi
Webster Hall
Friday, June 18

Farewell tours are weird, the celebratory nature of live rock being counteracted by the knowledge that this will never happen again; the listener can frequently walk away feeling weirdly hollow, as though the experience was somehow lessened by its unrepeatability. After 13 years and five albums (plus several EPs, a half-dozen or so live discs, a DVD, and dozens of austere/dignified T-shirts), the revered post-metal quintet Isis are calling it quits; their current U.S. tour is their final run of live dates. Their Friday night show at Webster Hall, which was followed by a Music Hall of Williamsburg gig Saturday night, was a concise summary of their artistic achievement--in effect, a final report on the work of the last decade-plus.

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