Category Archives: Music

Concerts, Music

Concert Diaries: The Tune-yards, Live at the Music Box

I missed the Tune-yards when they performed at the Troubadour this July. The show was sold out, and I was not clued in yet to the complex rituals of obtaining second-hand tickets to LA concerts. Thankfully, Merrill Garbus was back in town four months later, and last Wednesday, I found myself part of the pandemonium that accompanied her Music Box performance.

Seriously, I run out of superlatives.

Picture this. Two opening sets have come and gone. The first, Pat Jordache – and what appeared to be four of his family members accompanying him on instruments, always interesting to see family bands together – had catchy hooks and a very disquieting vocal palette. (Track of note: ‘Phantom Limbs’) The second was turntablist Cut Chemist, previously known for his work with DJ Shadow and Ozomatli, who got everyone grooving to his percussion-hopping, genre-squishing vinyl shenanigans. And then Merrill comes on stage, wearing a purple dress with green papier-machey necklace and a cheerful smile that appears completely at odds with the warpaint on her face. She closes her eyes briefly, and then launches into a 3-minute vocal outburst that is part yodel, part gutteral wail, part ritualistic war-cry. The crowd roars with her. She finishes , the band has slid into positions, and they launch into the thumping ‘My Country’. The song is a propulsive, celebratory melody that made me want to run around the house, shrieking with glee, when I first heard it early this year. Hearing it live makes me grin like a maniac and frantically try record it on the phone. The band clangs on pans and utensils to get the chaotic feel of the song just right, Merrill’s voice is powerful enough to make chandeliers sway and hair stand on end. The synth line comes in, I give up futile attempts to record for posterity and just give myself up to the music.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzQ3X8u9nAI[/youtube]

 

Merrill, on stage, is funny, whimsical and so totally at ease with the complicated loops she creates on the fly, multi-layered textures of her voice for different phrases in the songs. She switches between drumsticks and a ukelele – the second ukelele performance I had seen that week, more on that later. Some of the drum loops – especially the bass thumps – are pre-programmed (I think), with the fill-ins layered by her live, and at times she even hits her microphone stand to get the right sound. The other musicians include a bassist and occasional knob-twiddler, and a saxophonist and a trumpeteer. Nothing fancy, but the overall effect is one of an insanely well-coordinated outfit that knows how to gut-punch the crowd.

Cut Chemist comes out again, joining the band on ‘Gangsta’, overlaying the song – already a catchy number – with a delicious scratch-track. Pure fucking magic. One of the best concerts I’ve seen so far, and I’ve seen pretty great bands this year. When the Tune-yards are coming back to LA – and they most definitely are – I am going again. Yes, it’s that good a band.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv-74W4Nd6k[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63bom4K0fbY[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhOCIpIEe9w[/youtube]

 

 

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Music

Pieces of Sound

I hum to myself a lot. All these pieces of sound that rattle inside my head, like this non-stop radio station playing my favorite and non-favorite tunes, they sort of simmer and then overflow. Not complete songs, mind you, those only play when I am really bored, and I haven’t been bored in a long while now. What I hum are just fragments of tunes, sonic branches that come and go as they please.

It’s a harmless habit that inches more towards annoying  if you are the person sitting next to me in office. Somewhat creepy if I am doing it in the bus and you’re sitting next to me, so I don’t.

It could be worse. There was this time in college when I absentmindedly whistled in class. I did not do it on purpose, I swear, but the subject and the lecture were boring and the tunes, they wouldn’t just stop. I do not blame the lecturer for thinking someone was trying to disrupt his class. He took it in his stride initially – would just stop and look around trying to read the faces of the students sitting in the general direction of where the sound came from. It sort of helped that I do not pucker my lips when I whistle.

I consciously stopped doing that. It was stupid. But some of my classmates felt more mischievous than I did, and began using it as a  thing to disrupt the class. The next time it happened, the lecturer threw a fit and refused to take any more classes until the culprit came to his room and apologized. Nobody did, and finally I went and confessed to having done it before. He was remarkably nice about it, I remember, just asked me not to do it again and came back to take classes from the next day. I am not sure he believed me saying that I had not done it that time.

The other major class disruption had to do with the bassline of ‘Urvasi’, back in school. It’s possible for an impressionable fifteen-year old to come up with a way to generate something similar to the sound of a synth-bass from the back of his throat. It’s also completely possible for said fifteen-year-old to figure out that others cannot localize the source of a sound produced that way, especially if one keep a straight face. Someday, when I am back in Guwahati, I want to confess to Rana-sir that I was the guy messing with his Advanced Mathematics class, and not someone playing Kaadhalan from the road, and that it was not necessary to shut all the windows every day before class to block that sound. This was done totally on purpose, oh man, I was a total douchebag.

On the plus side, I do hum in tune. It’s loathsome to be in tune when the song in question is Mika’s ‘Grace Kelly’, but I manage.

On the hum-list right now:

  • The first few lines of Zeb & Haniya’s Chup, especially the main trumpet line.
  • Random lines from the Rock Star album. The lines translate to “All that I wish to say/is ruined/by the words I employ”. I also try to hum parts of the first song of the album, called ‘Phir Se Ud Chalaa’, which is devilishly tough to transcribe on a single vocal line, let me tell you.
  • The main bass-groove in the Attack the Block OST.
  • The opening to ‘Tom’s Diner’ by Suzanne Vega.

It’s interesting – well, maybe just to myself, but that’s the whole point of this blog, isn’t it? – that some of these tracks just come out of nowhere. The Rock Star tracks are fairly obvious. ‘Chup’ comes from my recent rediscovery of the Zeb/Haniya album thanks to the Dewarists episode that I talked about a few days ago. Attack the Block, when I began humming it and realized what I was doing, became a mystery to me, until I realized that the bass-line is somewhat similar to a loop that plays in Monsters Ate My Condo. (Which is this awesome iPad game that I am playing at the moment, and it has gotten me interested enough to miss my bus-stop a few times)

Funny things happen. ‘Sahara’, from the Sivaji OST began playing in my head when I was reading Richard Starkings’ Elephantmen, because Sahara is the name of one of the characters in the series. That morphed into an upbeat rendition of the ending of Dil Se, which I’ve mentioned earlier as the inspiration behind the main melody of Sahara, and suddenly became a mashup of the opening melody to ‘Tom’s Diner’ and Fallulah’s ‘Bridges’.

That’s not just it. The guitar and trumpet line from ‘Chup’ are trying very hard to remind me of ‘Mrs Robinson’, and I have no idea why. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ floats in every now and then too.

It gets awkward sometimes. Especially when I’m humming something and someone asks me what the tune is, and I realize that I have to backtrack, in my head, to figure out what it was. That takes time. And makes me appear completely stupid.

The worst it gets is when I pause and realize that I am in the middle of a tune that I should not really be humming. ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’, for example, the song by Deep Blue Something. Or ‘Two of Us’ by the Beatles. That’s when I shake myself out of it and change channels, in my head. Some pieces of sound do not belong there anymore.

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Music

Björk- Crystalline

Medulla was the last Björk album I listened to with religious intensity. After that, there was a parting of ways, a stupid feeling that she had peaked and it would be embarrassing to have her newer output wash away the intensity of old. But back then, once upon a time, Björk was Music 101.  Her alien-accented voice not only turned my knees to jelly, it also represented an expansion of my consciousness. She taught me that music need not always be comforting and happiness-inducing, that it was not necessary for the words in a song to rhyme, that discordance can transport you to a new world. My knowledge and my appreciation of music became inconsequential, it felt like I knew nothing. She challenged my taste, she made me hunger, and I fell in love.

I would be distorting facts to suit the point at hand if I said that everything I subsequently listened to was because of Björk. But I’ll admit this: the kind of music I love and actively seek features female artistes twiddling knobs and going bat-shit crazy with their voices. I attribute this completely to my not-quite-adolescent slobbering over her, and the need to satisfy the musical hunger she brought into my life.

‘Crystalline’ from Biophilia, her latest album, is not a song, in my opinion. It’s a synaesthetic experience, especially if you own an iDevice. The song saw life as an App, where you had to guide a gliding object through three-dimensional tunnels, picking up crystals on the way. What you pick determined what you heard. Instead of being a distraction, the game became a mesmerizing visual interpretation of the musical experience. Suddenly, Björk has found a new way of crawling out of my headphones into the hidden places of my brain.

Side note: The tinkling chord progression that cocoons the majority of the track is played on the gameleste, a combination of the Indonesian Gamelan and the celesta that was commissioned by Björk for this album. There’s a lovely Youtube video that shows the making of the instrument, here.

 

It is easy to say that the last minute of the song, where the drums cut loose, is the Epic Win moment of the album. But listen closer. If the beat were a living thing, I would say that the composer almost eases it into that last minute. When the song begins, the beat tiptoes into the sound-scape tentatively, a bass kick at a time, and then tries to settle into a hissy groove. But like a petulant child that cannot decide how best to draw attention to itself, it tries to be oh-so-quiet; then froths and seethes, trying to attach itself to the loop sailing smoothly by in whatever way it can. Björk’s voice flirts again and again with the percussion in subtle ways – the rolling ‘r’ when she rhymes “with our hearts” with “quartz”, of the drawn-out sibilance of her “polygonssss”. But it is also the voice that keeps the beat in check, forcing it to morph into different rhythmic sub-explosions in course of the song as it tries to break free of the claustrophobic layers of chorus and gamelesta. Until that crucial last minute when, as the chimes fade away, the drums declare independence. It is pure, gleeful sonic destruction, and one can almost imagine her standing on one side and smiling at her creation as it lays waste to the house that the song built, the impotent sputters and fizzes transformed into violent, happy percussion patterns.

It ends the same way it begins – without warning. And I am in love again.

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Music

A few thoughts on Episode 2 of the Dewarists

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1YxxI08710[/youtube]

I haven’t watched the second episode of The Dewarists yet. But I did listen to the song, entitled ‘Kya Khayaal Hai’, which features Pakistani cousins Zeb and Haniya collaborating with composer Shantanu Moitra and singer/lyricist Swarnand Kirkire. I had heard Z&H’s songs on Coke Studio, and that was it. I find Shantanu Moitra’s film work pleasant pop-floss, his tunes are perfectly serviceable (except when he’s plagiarizing, which he does not, most of the time) and Swanand Kirkire’s work has also been fairly middling, not really songs that I would really pay much attention to or want to listen to over and over.

Everything about the song drips with familiarity. The melody meanders around a 7/4 beat. Moitra and Kirkire had used this in ‘Baawra Mann’, one of their most famous compositions from Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi, as did Zeb & Haniya in their famous Dari song ‘Paimona Bitte’. I remember the beat from Rahman’s ‘Sona Nahin Na Sahi’ (One Two Ka Four), and parts of this song’s melody are echoed in ‘Kya Khayal’. (Listen to 1:26 of KKH) Also, the choice of Dari lyrics to open this track – was it really necessary? Swanand’s earthy singing detracts from the velvety female voices; frankly, he does not have the vocal chops to carry his end of things. Still, there are quite a few things I like – the stripped-down arrangement works in its favor, the use of claps to punctuate Swanand’s singing, the brilliant harmony by the two ladies in Haniya’s portion of the song. While not as flighty and sonically astounding as the first Dewarists’ song ‘Minds Without Fear’ was, this track is charming. Predictable, but charming.

The song did make me go check out Zeb and Haniya’s 2008 album Chup!, and I have to admit that it is the trumpet-playing of Swedish Jazz virtuoso Hildegunn Øiseth that got my attention, and which is responsible for the smoky feeling on some of the tracks of this feel-good pop album – ‘Kabhi Na Kabhi’, for example. Dang Swedes, I tell you, slowly taking over the world one album at a time.

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Concerts, Music

Concert Diaries – Portishead Live At Shrine Expo

Picture taken by Flickr user corboamnesiac

There’s this thing I’ve noticed about live shows. The music on the sound system before the show is due to begin has nothing in common with the musical sensibility or genre of the band you’ve come to listen to. Sometimes I get the feeling that sound engineers at concerts, much like quiz-masters and bloggers, are very concerned about broadcasting their taste to the audience at large. Like, hey, I know you guys’ve heard this band and shit, but you are going to like this band more, because I said so. At the James Blake concert, the DJ played a bunch of dance music, while the person operating the sound system at the Portishead concert day before yesterday seemed to have a reggae hangover. We stood around for about 55 minutes listening to a playlist that, in the immortal words of B Stinson, went heavy on the  “mm hm chaka mm hm chaka” bassline. Ah, who’s “we”, you ask? I happened to run into old pal Richard and his fiancee at the Shrine. Tuning out the reggaethon going on in the background, we spent much of those minutes catching up – by which I mean we talked nineteen to the dozen about comics, movies and TV shows. Good times.

I had gotten my tickets to the concert just a day ago, thanks to a Craigslist samaritan who wanted to sell her extra ticket for cover price. (Yes, weep with envy, people, CL-trolling does have its virtues) I did not even know there was an opening band, but as soon as the three-member group began to play, I was struck by the Indian/middle-eastern sound, the glissandos, in particular. Echoey, spaced-out guitars that transformed into wall-of-noise level sonic mayhem, wailing vocals-sans-words that reminded me of Peter Gabriel’s Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack. It was because of this overly-familiar air that I did not enjoy the band as much, just seemed a little too predictable for my taste. Turned out their name was Thought Forms, and sure enough, the band does have Indo-credentials – the lead guitarist is a lady named Deej Dhaliwal.

When Portishead finally took the stage, at 9:30 PM, we had been standing around for almost 2 hours. The band launched into ‘Silence’, from their third album, and over the next hour and a half, they systematically managed to reduce me to a gibbering wreck that would have uncomplainingly waited for 2 hours more. Yup, that good.

Beth Gibbons, onstage, was totally into it. She hardly spoke anything between songs, and uttered maybe two or three sentences in course of the show. She wasn’t there for the audience, she hardly acknowledged the applause and the cheering crowd. Everytime there was an instrumental solo, she would face away and sort of tense her body, like she was using the music to recharge her vocal chords. When she sang, she crinkled her eyes shut and shook her head from side to side, in time with the beat. Her voice, oh dear lord, her raw, unprocessed, haunting voice gave me goose-pimples. It was only at the end of the final song ‘We Carry On’, when the rest of the band went apeshit with their musical denouement, that Gibbons unwound visibly, stepping down from the stage and reaching out to fans in the front row.

As a band, Portishead is fucking flawless. Not a single note strayed from the recorded version. Even the scratching was perfect. To me, this was a bit of a disappointment – a live show is meant to be about improvisation and reinterpretation just as much as about fidelity. However, a lot of the experience was enhanced by the video wall at the back, where swirling shapes and abstract patterns merged with a live video feed of the band’s performance. This was not just generic concert shots, this was footage taken from different stationary cameras placed strategically on the stage, spliced together and overlaid with filters. This resulted in strange and somewhat disconcerting visual effects – like a shot of the bass drum pedal dissolving to bassist Jim Barr’s fingers on the frets, overlaid with face-melting shots of Gibbons’ singing. Digital video is the future, people, it seems to have rendered recreational hallucinatory drugs redundant.

The set-list was a ‘best-of’ mix from all the three albums and also included the new single ‘Chase the Tear’. Seemed like the only two songs where the video was replaced by generic concert lights were ‘Glory Box’ and ‘Sour Times’, the most well-known of the band’s discography. My personal high-point was the track ‘Machine Gun’. The song is all staccato beat and aggression, and Gibbons’ voice possesses an ethereal wispiness that counterbalances that aggression, especially with a reedy, multi-tracked wail that percolates in the background. It builds up to an anthemic synth lead solo, which they totally totally nailed live.

A few words about the Shrine Expo center, the venue of the concert. Apparently it’s next to the Shrine auditorium, which was a Grammy and Oscar venue in the 80s and 90s, before the newly designed Nokia and Staples centers took over. Before that, the auditorium was also a temple devoted to a Freemasonry spin-off body called the Shriners, short for The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. As I slumped in my seat in the bus back home, gaping at the Wikipedia link, it crossed my mind that there was an Alan Moore story hidden somewhere in the history of that auditorium, waiting to be released. But it was past midnight, and I safely put that thought to rest.

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