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i only found out this thing was happening about two weeks ago, when i was checking to see if there were any details about phantogram’s july show yet posted to the club’s website. i have to admit i didn’t really listen to the dodos at all before i saw the posting for this – it caught my attention purely for the involvement of gauntlet hair. i discovered them last year – i wrote about them in this blog (OH MY GOD, IT’S BEEN OVER A YEAR AGO NOW, LOOK: http://tongsmusic.com/2010/05/26/some-new-songs-that-dont-blow/) because i was so impressed by their song “our scenery,” which, once upon a time, was featured on gorilla vs. bear. this is what i had to say about that track at the time:

“There’s this interesting new crop of lo-fi musicians that seem to be combining the shoegazey, surreal sounds of bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain and Slowdive with contemporary indie (and by ‘contemporary indie,’ I mean everything from the quirky pop/rock of The Shins to the dance-or-die electro of Passion Pit). Gauntlet Hair is one of them, and bizarrely enough, they sound a little bit like Dom, a group from Worcester that I assume they can’t possibly know much of anything about (GH is from Colorado). At any rate, I’ve loved what I’ve heard from GH so far, and ‘Our Scenery’ is no exception – it builds up innocuous, drifting verses into wall-of-sound choruses, all interwoven with echo-laden vocals doused with as much reverb as the guitars. Between the jumpy guitars, crescendoing drums, and chilly vocal harmonies, listening to the song is a bit like opening a time capsule of late ’80s-early ’90s indie rock. Go their Myspace page and turn it up loooooooud.”

anyway, i was thrilled at the opportunity of seeing these guys on what i found out was/is their first states-wide tour, so i got tickets right away. i checked out the dodos after the fact and loved what i heard, so that was a plus (though everyone seems wrapped up in sucking the dick of their 2008 breakout album visiter, their entire catalog is pretty damn solid and satisfying). and soon enough, last night was upon us.

there weren’t many people watching gauntlet hair, but many of those in attendance seemed familiar with the band, and both those who were and those who weren’t all definitely enjoyed themselves. it was hard not to: their music is a reverb-drenched, echoey wall of monstrous sound, and it’s a beautiful thing to get lost in. i’ve always felt like i’m in a cave, lit by a d&d-style torch or two when i’m listening to their stuff; it’s just cavernous music. that’s the word i’d use to describe it if asked: cavernous. it also has this bizarre…i don’t know, “candlelight” quality to it. to my synesthete’s ears, it sounds burnt orange, and shadowy – it’s a little like when you’d shine flashlights at your chin when you were telling ghost stories as a kid.

these guys are incredible performers, too. drummer craig nice is front and center, and between his kit-battering energy and his tongue-in-cheeky stage banter it’s hard to not think of him as the frontman (which is not to belittle singer/guitarist andy r. in the slightest – they just have very different stage presences). andy clearly loses himself in the channeling of his soaring, reverberating vocals; every strum of his guitar was another floodgate burst, another wave shaking through us audience members at bone-level. these two core gauntlet boys were joined by a bassist and a rhythm guitarist who rounded out the live sound succinctly. for a band who claims to have played less than 30 live gigs in the entire duration of their career, they were tight as fuck, especially on the aforementioned “our scenery” (which better get these dudes the attention they deserve, i’m sayin’) and the head-sticking “i was thinking.”

oh, and when my best friend and i walked past mr. nice as he was chatting with some people outside, we caught his eye and he joined us for a stroll through the back alleys of commonwealth avenue. we chatted for a while and i let him know that i’d blogged about his band before, and was actually there to see them quite a bit more than to see the dodos. i think he was either impressed or just generally taken by us weirdos, so he gave us a copy of gauntlet hair’s 7″ record and later led us to the front of the crowd (now quite a bit fuller) to watch the dodos. we spent the duration of the headliner’s set bopping around with him and his bandmates and largely feeling like the coolest people in the observable universe.

i suppose the dodos deserve some of my attention here, too – and oh, i shouldn’t say it like that, because they put on a killer show. i do have to admit the bulk of my familiarity with them is visiter-based, so i didn’t immediately recognize a lot of their set. still, every song was perfect or damn near it, percolating with the tension i feel this band has a real mastery of, replete with enough push-pull loud-soft-loudness to keep us on our toes (and dancing, at that) for close to an hour and a half. what impressed me the most was their comfort in the louder end of the sonic spectrum, something one might not expect from the content of their records. there was a heaviness there, though, and undeniably so.

i’m always eager to point out happy bands when i see them, and the dodos looked every bit as content as they were making their audience feel. from the way they were acting and grinning like kids on christmas, i’d guess it was their first major headlining tour or close to it. they had a superb onstage rapport with one another – you know, those knowing looks musicians shoot across the stage, that “we are of one mind” vibe – and with the crowd as well. i feel like all of this culminated in the form of their most famous tune, “fools” (yeah, that’s the miller chill one). maybe it’s trite to single this song out, but it’s one of their best and certainly among my favorites of theirs. it seemed a bit sped up, like most of their set, but not rushed in the slightest. the energy was palpable in that room, and though many of us knew where to expect the rises and falls, the tension remained. those “purple bottle”-esque drums thrummed like a heartbeat; meric long’s stellar voice rollicked through those mouthy lyrics without a misstep; the audience was mixing in foot stomps and “oh-oh, whoa-ohs” as applicable.

so, bottom line: one of the best shows i’ve been to all year? fuck yes. definitely one of the most intimate, participation-friendly concerts i’ve gone to in all my years of music fandom, too. i’d jump at the chance to see both of these bands again and i’m already stoked for gauntlet hair’s forecasted by-the-end-of-the-year return. i was a little late to the party with discovering the dodos, but i’ve been ranting about those gauntlet men for 13 months and you, dear reader, ought to check ‘em out and hear why. google that shit!

over and out, blogneticut.

(aviatrix – in fact, you might find me very interesting)

moving right along: on saturday night, i went to see blackfield and anathema at the royale here in boston. i had tickets to this for three months beforehand – it was crazy enough that blackfield was playing shows in the US, but this was the first time anathema has ever toured in this country. pretty insane when you consider they’ve been making music for two decades or so. anyway, i have a storied history with both of these bands, and it was magnificent to be able to see them both back to back. in total, it was one of the most arresting and moving concerts i’ve ever been to, and definitely the best show i’ve seen all year.

blackfield is one of the many side projects of steven wilson, the man behind the incomparable porcupine tree. he works with popular israeli rock singer aviv geffen to create some of the most baldly earnest – and saddest – music you’re ever likely to hear. geffen’s blunt lyrics and his at-times hard to digest vocal delivery toes a fine line between melodrama and comedy, but wilson helps him hone the most moving parts of his songs and the result is as emotionally intense as it is musically beautiful.

i’ve been a porcupine tree fan for ten years now, and when blackfield surfaced with their eponymous first album in 2005, i have to say i initially wasn’t wild about what i heard. in those days, though, i was quite the metalhead, and what blackfield sounded like to my ears then was like a watered-down version of porcupine tree minus all of the brilliant, cathartic heaviness. i shelved them for the time being, but by the time their second album came out in 2007, my tastes had changed significantly. due in part to the enthusiasm of my then-boyfriend for its song “some day,” blackfield ii became the soundtrack to my sophomore year of college. when i revisited the first album, i found myself smitten, too, specifically with the gorgeous arrangements and intricate production on songs like “summer” and “hello” (the latter of which i would rank among my favorites of all time, if i had the time or the wherewithal to type out such a list).

my second year of college (2007/2008) was a very difficult time for me. i was deeply depressed and stalwartly avoiding medication or therapy due to a mixture of my own capacity for being excessively headstrong and monetary concerns. my relationship with john was the only one i had bothered cultivating or contributing to in some time, so i found myself friendless and estranged from my family. i spent the latter half of my spring semester desperately seeking employment and failing to find anything aside from a part-time position doing grunt work in the college’s registrar’s office (see my recent post about opeth’s watershed album for more details on that, and the wonderful summer that followed). so, i turned to my usual solace, my lifelong hidey-hole – music – and blackfield’s (at that time) two records proved to be the centerpieces of my listening.

steven wilson’s work has always been some kind of weird aural comfort food for me. i guess i feel like i identify with both his way of describing the world lyrically and how he expresses his feelings musically. he’s too smart, too much of an outsider, and his chosen isolation in music is a result of that. his songs are melancholy and wistful, cheeky and self-aware, introspective and observant. he’s no technical genius, but he doesn’t need to be, and at any rate the simplicity of his music gives it much of its power. i’ve always had parasocial/imaginary relationships with the musicians i idolize, and my darker times i’ve often turned to wilson’s multitudinous projects as a means of seeking out a strange form of commiseration, with him i guess. that was the role those blackfield records were playing for me three years ago. since college, i’ve largely moved away from listening to them and porcupine tree’s stuff as well, due at least a little bit in part to my better performance at social integration and control over my anxieties. but seeing them at royale the other night reintroduced me to all of this stuff, to their songs both new and old, to my history with their catalog. and while i stood there dumbfounded trying to blink away tears the whole time, i’m glad it happened like it did. it was cathartic and immersing, and let me tell you: these guys can put on a real fucking rock concert.

i don’t want to gloss over anathema here; i’ve listened to them since the inception of my porcupine tree fandom because very few people listen to PT without hearing something about anathema (and opeth too, for that matter). they were once a doom metal band, back in the early ’90s, but towards the end of that decade they made a decided shift towards ambient-tinged melodic prog and they’re all the better for it. their albums alternative 4 and a fine day to exit are among the best relatively-straightforward-rock records i can even think of, and their latest album we’re here because we’re here was by far and away the best offering of its genre that came out last year – at least to this set of ears (note: if you listen to that record and don’t come away feeling like your heart’s been shattered into pieces and like you need to be held close to someone’s chest for the next hour or two, you might be a sociopath).

anyway, they played first, in condensed pseudo-acoustic form, with just mainmen and brothers danny and vincent cavanagh, a couple of guitars, and a sampler. in the hands of a less talented pair, this could have been terribly dull, but not with anathema. vincent’s voice is one of the most beautiful and terrifyingly powerful i can think of in all genres, and let’s be honest, he probably could have carried the whole weight of their performance a capella and it would have been just as good. but i shouldn’t belittle their playing, or danny’s masterful use of the sampler – and the guitar as a percussion instrument.

they started the set with “thin air,” the balls-grabbing, heart-wrenching opener of we’re here because we’re here, and even that song’s on-album, almost-overproduced resplendence was done justice, all soaring vocals and loping guitars and periods of instrumental tension. they only were on for seven songs, playing an assortment from their last five albums minus, sadly enough, a fine day to exit, but it’s hard to complain when they gave us two of alternative 4‘s finest (“lost control” and “fragile dreams”), a pair of judgment’s kicks-in-the-emotional-nads (“deep” and “one last goodbye”), one of a natural disaster‘s many highlights (“flying”), and another slice of the brilliance that is we’re here because we’re here (“angels walk among us” – don’t let the corny title fool you). the cavanaghs knew their crowd: many of us had been clamoring to see them for years, and they were clearly just as excited as we were to be in boston. danny took a picture of the audience at one point for bragging rights to the rest of the band, who vincent mentioned might be joining them for a second round come fall. here’s hoping.

so, their set was woefully short, but every minute of it was as intense and charged as their music is on record. we didn’t have to wait long for blackfield, mostly because the cavanaghs had been playing in front of the headliners’ already-set-up equipment. they picked the perfect opener, too: one of the best tracks from their latest album welcome to my dna, the middle eastern-tinged bombast that is “blood.” the sound system in the royale is incredible, but i was worried that even it wouldn’t be able to handle the multi-layered nuance of a steven wilson project. boy, was i off-base. save for mr. wilson’s voice being a little too buried in the mix for the first two songs or so, the band sounded fucking incredible.

they tore through seventeen songs before taking any sort of a break, paying equal attention to their three records and hitting most of the highlights from each. i’m not wild about welcome to my dna; i think it pales in comparison with both of the previous records and i was pretty disappointed even after spinning it a few times. still, even the weakest songs on that album sounded great on saturday night, like the meandering title track and the jarring-in-a-bad-way “go to hell.” “go to hell” suffers from its ridiculous high school poetry lyrics, or so i thought. but when geffen sings “fuck you all, fuck you/i don’t care/go to hell” over and over again, isn’t there something to be said about that kind of unadorned earnestness? after all, there are plenty of other bands (porcupine tree included) that sing songs about feeling the same way; they just take the extra step of wrapping it all up in figurative language. anyway, the performance of it was effective enough to make me think more closely about the song.

for me, the high points (of course) were my favorites from the first two albums: the seriously pitiful “pain” with its hopeless lyrics and striking chorus; the string-laden glistening dollop of melancholia known as “miss u;” the three-minute exercise in compositional perfection that is the piano-driven “hello.” welcome to my dna‘s standout track, “zigota,” was one of the best pieces of the performance too, starting off as it did with lulling musings that slowly build up into gripping mellotron-washed verses and chilling choruses. i still find myself muttering “one direction with no turning back/soon it will burn to black” under my breath a few dozen times a day.

the way these guys play together and bounce off one another on stage is so great to behold. for all of the heaviness and drama of their music, their camaraderie is clear as day. by the time they closed with a version of “cloudy now” with extra swells-and-falls-and-swells-agains, they had played twenty-one tracks and honestly looked ready to play another ten. their energy is difficult to describe, but omnipresent and so easy to get caught up in. i left the royale feeling like something had either been torn out of me or something had been added. it’s hard to explain. things just seemed different, and they still sort of do.

i’m struggling to find a succinct way of concluding this, so i’m just going to go for the gold. both of these bands are worthy of your attention if they don’t already have it. so go listen.

“don’t you know there’s only one way out, and it comes when it comes.”

yawn opened. they’re a band from chicago that very much subscribes to the latter day animal collective music model (i’m talkin’ samplers, synths, and echoey vocal harmonies). i have a hard time knowing how to feel about them: i love the style of music they create; it is that of my favorite band, after all, but something about these guys doing it just didn’t feel right. i will say that their song “kind of guy” is the exact sort of gauzy quirk-pop dapple of deliciousness i want to be listening to at any point in time, and that they’re accomplished musicians for sure. they should really try to find their own voices (literally and idiomatically) – if they pulled that off, they’d be wonderful. their hearts were in the right place, in the sun-soaked lounge of where ambient electronics and folk meet (some might call that the chillwave room), and they seemed to satisfy the quarter-full ‘dise and its not-drunk-enough-to-dance-yet patrons well enough.

yuck were next. i unfortunately missed the bulk of their set because of a few extenuating circumstances involving a dark BU alley, but apparently they weren’t as good as when we caught them at sxsw. just as well; i’m not wild about their music though i understand why people are. isn’t it weird when that happens? anyway, i know more than a few people who stumble upon this blog via google searching are going to be disappointed to see that i don’t have anything more to say about them, but (contrary to popular belief, all y’all “allston ladies’ room” hatas) i’m not gonna make stuff up.

and then came tame impala. i saw them at the same place in november and i do have to say that was the better performance, but last night they certainly weren’t bad. they’re one of the few straight-up rock bands that i have a stomach for these days, and they gave us a bona fide rock show: stringed-instrument mashing, soaring vocals, and a monster onslaught of drums. highlights for me included “alter ego,” the song from innerspeaker that i feel is their best (and the least similar to the other tracks on the album, which is definitely a valid criticism one could make about this group), the rompin’-stompin’ riff fest that is “solitude is bliss” – replete with all its on-album catchiness and aplomb, and a totally unexpected but entirely welcome psych-rock cover of massive attack’s “angel,” the trip-hop mega-anthem that opened their classic mezzanine album.

i was woefully distracted throughout the night so i wish i could say more about the actual performance. but i will say that this music, all of this music, all night long, provided the perfect soundtrack for what i was going through. yawn’s music has a sense of wide-eyed wonderment to it, an almost childlike sort of curiosity (admittedly this too is quite animal collective of them, but still, i’ll give credit where credit is due); when i got there, before things got difficult and, yeah, i’ll say uncomfortable, i was feeling that, being there at a show with a new guy (and the one i was lamenting over in this blog a few months ago at that). yuck kept that feeling going, but drenched it in nostalgia and post-adolescent life-questioning as well. and by the time tame impala came on, their songs about second-guessing and indecision and frustration in general were almost preternatural soundtracks to the goings-on of my brain.

i know i’m partially guilty of twisting lyrics and stuff around to seem like they better fit my situation here. we all do this to some extent, but therein lies the framework for our obsessions with musicians, or our identification with them (at least for those of us who pay close attention to lyrics and wind up applying their contents and meanings to ourselves). and i think that goes beyond music/lyric relationships and is true of any sort of art. why do we like the books and movies and paintings and poems we like? isn’t it because we hear a little bit of ourselves in those words, or see a flicker of our mind’s eye in those pictures, or see ourselves as framing things in the same mindset as the creators of those works were in when they framed those works? i think so.

bottom line, though: great fucking show, and it feels great to write about it. i’m trying hard to get back in the swing of blogging again. i just don’t feel like i can safely speak my mind here sometimes, y’know? but… where can you do that?

* overpsych myself for everything i see.

* manage not to be disappointed by concerts, unless they really and truly suck (see: passion pit at governor’s island in june last year).

* test the limits of the boston public transit system by staying ’til the end of the headliners’ sets.

* blow a few too many bucks on a vodka tonic. or two.

* wish i was in these bands i pay to go see, that it was my full-time job, too.

* will be a screaming, hyper, obsessive 13-year-old girl when it comes to music.

tame impala and yuck, here i motherfuckin’ come.

you know what i’m talking about: it’s in pearl jam’s “alive;” it’s in, well, every alice in chains song ever and every stone temple pilots song pre-1996; it’s that “yeah” (or maybe it would more accurately be spelled “yeRRRRh”) in the pre-chorus of collective soul’s “shine.” y’know, the one between all the dur-ner-ner-ner-dur-ner-ner-ner-ner-nert-NERTs.

the smashing pumpkins did it, when billy wasn’t taking the nasally high road. metallica built a buttrock empire on it. even bands no one cares and/or cared about, like econoline crush, were guilty. and long after most of those bands were more concerned with destroying napster than creating new material, everyone’s favorite christian rock-metal-pop crossovers creed dusted it off and brought it back into the lamelight.

it’s delightful to make fun of. even if you like that music, and i do like some of it. but give it a whirl sometime; you won’t be disappointed.

anyway, i was thinking about how in certain genres that presently exist, this same thing happens. i’ve been writing about cold cave lately; let’s throw them back into the mix here for a second. they have a singer who very much subscribes to the robert smith-times-peter murphy vocal delivery of latter day goth revival bands, and he’s certainly not alone in doing so: see the entrance band and stellastarr for details, and to some lesser (but more ian curtisy) extent, interpol. oh, and she wants revenge, and that gardens band that was out for like ten seconds a few years ago. then we also have the post-panda bear chillwave crew who’ve nailed that echoey, beachy noah lennox vibe-o-rama like it was their job: i’m talkin’ delorean and el guincho, just to brush against that iceberg (ha – get it! iceberg! chillwave! yeah, i need to get the fuck off the internet).

this is all interesting when you look at it from the point of view of understanding that the human voice is just another instrument. the same way the neo-goth kids nick the basslines and synth arps from their ’80s idols, they’re recreating the vocal stylings as well. that becomes a part of a “scene,” just as three-chord hardcore chord progressions did, just as the chugging bass and ratatat drums of that aural fecal matter…oops, i mean music got popular and dominated the genre.

anyway, every time i hear ’90s voice, i’m brought back to a really specific time in my life: early high school, when ’90s alt-rock was the unrivaled king of my musical domain. i played stone temple pilots’ “plush” at my 9th grade guitar recital. i got a stereo for my 14th birthday and wrote the names of all the noteworthy grunge and grunge-related acts on the speakers in bright red sharpie. do you ever think back on the first music you listened to regularly – the first stuff you really got obsessed with, and really dug deeply into (i mean, the stuff for which you bought the unauthorized biographies and the eBay bootlegs and everything) – and wonder what it was that made it so great to you then, especially when you can hardly stand it now?

my theory is that whatever you picked up first had some degree of mystery and power to it in your eyes because you’d never exactly heard anything else before. and either you kept on seeking that mystery and that power out in new and different stuff because you longed to relive it again, and you moved far away from that starting point, or you stagnated or stopped caring or whatever. therein lies the two factions of music fandom, i think.

“i am, iyaaam, iyaaaam, i said i wanna getttt neeeext to youuuuhhh, i wanna getttt cloooooose to yoooouuuhhhh…”

take “confetti,” for instance. this is a fantastic song any way you slice it, sounding like circa-1985 depeche mode-meets-the human league with its bright synth lead paired against dark, bassy arpeggios and fittingly disappointed lyrics. but wesley eisold’s borderline-of-a-breakdown delivery last night is absent here – and in most of the rest of these songs. he’s got an enjoyable enough voice, but having seen cold cave’s live show it’s hard to not sit here and subconsciously will him to do more.

still, it’s hard to squabble with the songwriting that went into tracks like the opener, “the great pan is dead,” what with its mile-high buildup of chiming synths, grinding guitars, and frantic vocals; when the chorus break through, you’d be hard-pressed not to affect your best robert smith yowl along with eisold. and “pacing around the church” is a dance-demanding jaunt through all that you love about the alternative music from 25 years ago; morrissey-like lyrics and delivery get paired with a ludicrously catchy synth line culled directly from the new order songbook. all of these comparisons are too easy to make, yes, but they’re all the kinds of comparisons you’d want your band to come up against (or at least i would – cold cave’s music, as played live at least, is strikingly similar to the kind of stuff i wish i knew how to create).

some of the other reviews i’ve seen of this album refer readers to check out the band’s older stuff – apparently that’s where the balance between their noisy roots and their affection for new wave was most striking. i’ll have to investigate because i’m feeling a little disappointed in this record. it’s rare that i feel a band is better live than recorded in terms of the actual quality of their music vs. showmanship, but that just might be the case here.

the kills, though: what beasts. just the two of ‘em, jamie hince and alison mosshart, sounding like hell’s chorus turned up to 13. those chugging, deep-dark-blues guitars; those rattling, half-broken-sounding drum machine drums; those hair-raising, chest-beating, ball-breaking VV vocals. alison owned that stage: she stalked it, climbed it, slithered across it; she grabbed the hands of the front row and whipped her head around to maximize the splash damage of her sweat. they mostly stuck to newer fare, but “no wow” and the handful of tracks from midnight boom were extra delectable – as wide-eyed intense and dictionary-definition visceral as one would expect from their records. the crowd licked up every last droplet, gyrating and head-swinging like the ragtag bunch of indie rock miscreants they most certainly were.

for those of you unaware, dispatch creates the most vanilla, snooze-inducing wannabe-folk fapoffs imaginable. they are the quintessential band for people who like rock music as stomach-churningly insipid as staind and godsmack and three doors down but also self-identify as hippies or members of some other “liberal” or “creative” subculture, so they join drum circles and look for songs with five-minute banjo solos to vibe out/play ultimate frisbee to. seriously, i can’t name another band whose fans are as homogeneous as dispatch’s, save for maybe insane clown posse’s (but at least juggalos are entertaining, as opposed to being milquetoast oxygen-wasters who make 18 to 34-year-olds who vote democrat seem like a boorish backward-visored mob of hackey sack players).

dispatch has been around for fifteen years or something like that. they’ve only got four studio albums to their name, but they’ve gone through the breakup-then-reform-n’-tour cycle a bunch of times since they stopped attempting to compose palatable new material. this has given them the unique ability of being able to make appearances in the favorite bands roster of two or maybe even three distinct generations of alterna-bros, meaning that a cool dad who knocked up his armpit hair-brandishing college girlfriend to the sounds of “hey hey” back in 1995 is probably gonna go get his d-patch on with his now-teenage son in tow at one or more of these shows. it’s like TV syndication. or a franchise.

the bulk of my problem with this band is a problem i’ve been finding i have with dozens of acts i see at boston shows these days. on friday night, i went to see The Rex Complex open for Ellis Ashbrook, two new york-based bands with metro boston ties. both of them were fabulous; both acts play with such bombastic abandon and unstaged-but-still-over-the-top vitriol, making for some good clean no-strings-attached fun. on the downside, though, they were accompanied by two bands who, while being very technically proficient and tolerable enough to listen to, played with not even a scrap of feeling or sincerity or passion, well, anything to give a fuck about. and that’s dispatch in a nutshell right there.

to go above and beyond the overall shittiness of these bands, the thing that may be most upsetting here is that so many people eat this aural excrement up with fork and spoon and zeal and never realize what else is out there. which two bands had the lion’s share of the attention on friday night? how many thousands of people are going to those dispatch shows? who’s going to labor in obscurity until they do something more commercially viable? the outcome of all this is still so predictable and predetermined. it’s as if people want to be bored by and disconnected from the contents of their iPod, as if  it would be unthinkable for them to peer outside the culture-box they’ve self-compartmentalized in. and it sucks.

ah, well. wake me up when “the general” ends.

first of all, it’s no person pitch volume 2, which is good in most ways but not so good in a few. the not-so-good parts generally obtain to one thing i feel like panda is guilty of on these tracks. he is a master of simplicity, of paring things down to skeletal sketches: hell, see “my girls” if you need proof of that. but for some reason, on a few tracks here, he succumbed to an urge to tack too many things on to that core simplicity. take “slow motion,” for instance – i first heard it nearly a year ago last summer when it leaked alongside the album’s title track. the single/pre-album version is a thousand times preferable to what we actually get on the real tomboy, which takes that brilliant, eerie little piece of looped-and-relooped ingenuity and botoxes it up with unnecessary pockets of effected dissonance.

perhaps i’m getting too picky now that i’ve delved deeper into music making myself. but fear not as i have plenty of positivity to spin out about this album as well. the part of it that is most surprising is its hearkening back to panda’s pre-person pitch solo work (and the work of animal collective around that time as well) – the way it takes a young prayer-ish cue when the music starts to hug and close in around his voice during several of tomboy’s most powerful tracks, like opener “you can count on me” and the delightful nugget of beach boys-multiplied-by-avey tare joy known as  “surfer’s hymn.”

for all people say their favorite thing about animal collective is the way panda bear and avey tare approach music so differently, some of the best parts of this album are the parts where panda’s channeling his counterpart the most. “friendship bracelet,” which i fear is in certain danger of being overlooked by all but the most careful of listeners, is a bright little romp through the swamp avey took us to on last year’s underappreciated down there. “scheherezade” could have been culled from that record itself, ghostly as it is with its shimmering chimes and its chant-like vocals.

to me, the culmination of everything here and heretofore is “afterburner,” a spooling, hypnotic near-seven-minute ride through the fertile land panda bear has sewn at the intersection of techno, worldbeat, and that trademark animal collective-style ooey-gooey sample-folk beauty. it’s a lovely trance woven out of wavy echoes, plinking percussion, and the midi controlled guitar-strum haziness i now associate with all of this man’s music. a close second is “alsatian darn,” a cross pollination of the track “screens” from animal collective’s oddsac and the much-beloved (and much-parodied) person pitch opener, “comfy in nautica.” its stomps and claps and its multi-layered panda vocals and its gauzy, backlit instrumentation make for some real sublimity.

the bottom line of all this tl;dr is that tomboy might not be the nads-grabbing, blog-inspiring, relevance-showering critical spoogefest that was person pitch, but there’s plenty to love here too. i was happy to be able to hear many of these songs live when i saw mr. lennox at governor’s island last september and they are, for the most part, all the better for how they’ve been fleshed out since. i’m excited to see what animal collective will do next, as all of the parts of their sum have been up to some seriously stellar shit – except geo. he better get on the cool ship before it leaves port.

on another subject entirely, i have had the pleasure of both discovering the music and spending some time in the company of a band from brooklyn called warm ghost. their songs are the songs of unconsciousness; their debut uncut diamond ep is a somnambulatory affair, all slow-burning synths and lulling incantations. it’s a solid piece of work, but the band is encapsulated best when seen live. this past week, i caught them at tt the bear’s place in cambridge and also at a show at wesleyan university’s eclectic house (which i have to point out is a venue that sounds 50 times more awesome online than it is in person, replete as it is with, uh, “sassy” oblivious RAs that like to sit on merch).

live, the already-full sounds of the album become a bonafide wall of sound. from the lowest bass to the most quavery treble, it’s an immersion i haven’t experienced nearly enough with other bands. their sets varied from night to night, but both times i came away feeling mummified, wrapped up tight in the music and the dreamlike state it inspired. though herein lies a big journalistic conflict of interest, i do have to underline the strengths of their visual display. a sensory smorgasbord for sure, but one so intricately planned and executed as to seem a part of the music itself, the dew collecting on the spiderwebs of warm ghost’s sound, refracting everything into a luminescence that lingers on and on.

alright, kiddies. this yarn’s been spun. mama-tongs has to move on to more responsible (i.e., school-related) lawns. but if you’re still tuned in, i encourage you to spin the spit out of this shit. and let me know how you like it, too.