Fluxblog Weekly #12: U2 live in NYC, Micachu and The Shapes, Titus Andronicus, Swindle
If you like U2, this the week for you! If not, you've got some scrolling to do.
I made two music posts over at BuzzFeed this week, which is...a lot more than I have been doing in the recent past. The first one is a pretty straight forward collection of indie song recommendations, and the other is The Best Song Ever By 203 Famous Rock Bands, which is designed to be inscrutable and set people off, but all the song selections are my actual sincere opinions. That said – the artists I love the most, like R.E.M. and Pavement, were often impossible for me to do, and I just settled on some song that worked well enough to get them done.
July 20th, 2015
Everywhere Is America
U2 @ Madison Square Garden 7/18/2015
The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) / The Electric Co. / Vertigo / I Will Follow / Iris (Hold Me Close) / Cedarwood Road / Song for Someone / Sunday Bloody Sunday / Raised by Wolves / Until the End of the World / [The Fly remix intermission] / Invisible / Even Better Than the Real Thing / Mysterious Ways / Elevation / Ordinary Love / October / Every Breaking Wave / With or Without You / City of Blinding Lights / Bullet the Blue Sky / The Hands That Built America -> Pride (In the Name of Love) // Beautiful Day / Mother and Child Reunion -> Where the Streets Have No Name / One
• This was my 9th time seeing U2. I’ve seen them on every tour from Popmart onward, and I think this may have been the best U2 show I’ve seen. It’s definitely the best in terms of staging and lighting design – this was, BY FAR, the most immersive concert experience I’ve ever had in an arena – but I think I also just got lucky to see them on a particularly good night.
• The staging for this tour, along with what Nine Inch Nails was doing on the Tension arena tour in 2013, is very far ahead of the curve of what pretty much anyone else performing in arenas is up to. U2 have always been major innovators of the arena concert – the now standard mid-show b-stage and acoustic mini-set was invented by U2 on the Zoo TV tour in 1991. But what they have going on this time around is brilliant, and the logical next step from what they were doing on the Elevation and Vertigo tours. Basically, they have a minimal main stage on one end of the floor, and a smaller round stage at the other end, and the two are connected by a runway that bisects the general admission area. The runway is sometimes just a runway, but as the show goes on, there’s also a huge screen that sometimes has video art, and other times serves as a massive jumbotron equivalent. The are two levels when the screen is down, so Bono can walk around in the center of an animated image and interact with it, or the entire band can perform within the screen and appear or disappear inside the imagery. I’m not a big fan of the animation style they are using, but the craft is impeccable and at least a decade ahead of anyone aside from NIN.
• One of the things that makes the Innocence + Experience tour work so well is that unlike the Elevation, Vertigo, and 360 tours, there is an actual reason for U2 to play their new songs aside from promoting a new record. There is a clear narrative arc to this show, and even if songs like “Iris” and “Song for Someone” aren’t necessarily the band’s best work, they are compelling and moving in this context. The latter, a sorta schmaltzy ballad about Bono meeting his wife when they were teens in Dublin, gains some emotional weight from a visual that places him in the humble surroundings of his youth. That moment of gentle sweetness transitions directly into a particularly grim reworking of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and a dramatization of domestic terrorism just before the excellent “Raised by Wolves,” and it’s genuinely jarring. Bono singing about being a young punk fan can seem a bit indulgent, but this recollection of being suddenly shoved from “innocence” to “experience” is powerful, and gets to the core of why they’d spend an entire record looking back on this phase of their youth.
• “Until the End of the World” follows “Raised by Wolves,” and the new context gives it some new meaning. This time around, it’s as though the older Bono is singing to his younger self, and it’s about becoming hardened, cynical, and defeatist in the aftermath of tragedy. It’s about the end of innocence, and in doing so, giving in to despair. The song closes the first act of the show with flood imagery, and suddenly this song that was originally written about Judas and Jesus Christ is brought back into the Old Testament.
• “Bullet the Blue Sky” is back in U2’s set for the first time in a decade, which is another way of saying it was left out of the 360 tour. (You really have to see U2 when they come around, since they only seem to tour every four or five years now.) The band have a long history of reinventing “Bullet” on each tour, and making it about something else – on Zoo TV it was about racism, it was about the military industrial complex for Popmart, on Elevation it was about gun violence, and it was about violence inspired by religious extremism for Vertigo. Now it’s about money, and the Americanization of the world, and Bono imagining how a young version of himself would think of the old, rich Bono of today. It’s about feeling guilty for his wealth, and mocking his excesses. “I can see those fighter planes” from the original version is replaced with a snarky “I can see those private planes.” I think this take works really well, in large part because he’s dramatizing his mixed feelings about his success and what that means, and his complex feelings about the United States and what America is an idea vs. what the country is in reality. Bono shouted out recent events in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, and it didn’t come off as cheap. It was his way of confronting a very white and affluent audience, and pushing them to consider a grim reality that can be easily ignored if you feel safe and complacent in your own life.
July 21st, 2015
You Want Bare Knuckles But A Clean Fight
Micachu and The Shapes “Oh Baby”
Mica Levi is a genius of finding beauty in ugly, atonal sounds and harsh, clunking rhythms. Her earliest work with Micachu and The Shapes had a manic, restless edge, but at this point in her career, she’s embraced slower, more loping rhythms that feel more like a stupor than a frenzy. “Oh Baby” sounds like a Alabama Shakes type song that’s been dosed with downers – you can hear a bit of dub and chopped & screwed influence in the effect of it, but the actual sound is more unsettling and disconnected. That music tends to have a warm, womb-like vibe to it, but “Oh Baby” feels brittle and cold, and like it could break down at any moment.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 22nd, 2015
Fingernails Where There Should’ve Been Chalk
Titus Andronicus “Lonely Boy”
A thing I appreciate about Titus Andronicus is that as the band goes along, they seem to gravitate towards an early Springsteen/mid-period Clash sound – the strut and the hooks of glam, but rowdy and humble and aggressively working class. There’s a bunch of songs like this on The Most Lamentable Tragedy, but “Lonely Boy” is the one that really stands out, in part because it plays so well at face value while Patrick Stickles’ lyrics and vocals project a misanthropy that’s at odds with the music’s amiable, accessible vibe. Stickles is very funny here – he’s totally self-aware, and though he’s singing about very real antisocial tendencies, he sees the humor in it. This is just one part of a sprawling song cycle about manic depression, but I think it works well on its own as a microcosm of this emotional push-and-pull, and boom and bust cycle of having the energy required to get out there and live.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 23rd, 2015
Tell Me What You See
Swindle featuring Ash Riser “London to L.A.”
This is as surprising and formally strange as a song can probably get while also being very, very, very chill. Swindle’s arrangement is built around a lovely, jazzy chord progression played on guitar, but the rest of the song is constantly shifting – an early lead part that sounds very Stevie Wonder to me; a funky keyboard riff that could belong to a Justin Timberlake song; a full-on dubstep drop sequence that somehow doesn’t derail the mellow vibe. And then there’s a horn solo and a string section. It’s kinda amazing to hear him pull this off, and make everything sound like it all belongs in the same song. Even the parts that contrast the most with that central guitar part seem to just give in and go along with its flow.
Buy it from Bandcamp.