NVinNYC

I’ve been to a whole bunch of concerts these past 4 months in New York (it’s been pretty awesome). I’ve tried to write about all of them here, but sometimes (actually fairly often) I get lazy and end up just writing a bunch of little notes about the concert as a draft post and never actually posting. Anyway, this post is an attempt to make up for that. So here are a few short blubs with observations & links about a few of the concerts that I haven’t written full posts about.

Ambulance LTD & We Are Scientists (↪iTMS)
The Bowery Ballroom
October 27th, 2005

We Are Scientists rocked the house to start it off. They joked around constantly between songs (which is something fun that I wish more bands did), and performed their music very well. I used the verb performed here intentionally because they were doing much more than simply playing the songs as they were written. All three members of the band were very into the music and jammed along with it throughout the show. The best part of the show was definately the end when the singer and base player both jumped on top of the drum set to yell into one mic. Crazy awesomeness. Check out this picture of the crowd while they were on stage (sadly, I’m not in the pic; I’m a bit farther off to the right).

Ambulance also was awesome. They never disappoint me. Really you could read my review of their earlier concert and all the same great stuff pretty much applies to this concert too. They did reveal that, as this was the last show of the tour, they were planning on taking some time off an recording their next album. Apparently most of the songs are all written and ready to go, so hopefully there will be some new Ambulance in 2006.

The venue for this concert was the The Bowery Ballroom, and I have to say it’s one of my favorite venues yet. It’s fairly small and intimate so you can really see the performers (for my SoCal friends, it’s similar to but a bit smaller than the Henry Fonda Theater). Check out this picture of the crowd taken by the drummer of We Are Scientists to get a better idea (sadly, I’m not in the pic; I’m a bit farther off to the right). Additionally, the sound of is well balanced and (especially when you’re near the front) not too loud. Plus the decor and seating areas (both downstairs and on the balcony). One word of caution however; there is very little space backstage to store all the equipment so they usually unload it on the left side of the stage (from the audience perspective) between sets. If you’re standing there they will have you back off I’d recommend staying on the other side of the stage.

Jem (↪iTMS) & Josh Kelley (↪iTMS)
The Bowery Ballroom
November 7th

I’m not entirely sure why Jem or her managers decided to tour with Josh Kelley. He’s by no means a bad artist, but he doesn’t really match Jem’s style at all. Basically he’s very similar to light-rockers like Jason Mraz and John Mayer but with a bit more especially Southern rock influences courtesy of his Georgia heritage.
He did do a nice cover of “The Weight” by The Band, but I found most of his stuff to be a bit overly sappy & sentimental or worse, bland jam music. I talked to a few of the people around me when we were waiting for and it from the ones I spoke to seems like his main fan base is teenage women (who left after his set without hearing Jem), hrm…

On the other hand, Jem, once again amazed me with the way she blends disparate influences and styles and weaves them together to create something new. This was exemplified by her cover of Coldplay’s hit “In My Place” that transformed it from a mellow rock song into some kind of beat-box reggae tune. Besides her musical mash-up skills, Jem is just enthralling to watch perform. She dances around the stage acting out little parts of her songs and bobbing to the music. She has some kind of magnetic charisma when she is on stage that is could probably be used for Jobs-esque RDF like persuasion if she wanted. Of course, it helps that she is exceptionally attractive. This concert was no exception as she was wearing some tight jeans and a teal sequined sports-bra that was loosely covered by a ripped-up tank top that showed off her midriff (sadly no Keds though)…

Back to the music part though, one new addition to her band (since I saw here at Coachella in May) was a DJ (a bloke from Bristol by the name of Sir Bean) spinning a pair of turntables. He “mashed some beat” before the show started and provided some extended intro’s to some of her songs. However the largest thing he added was a few of the effects from some of Jem’s song that had previously been missing in her live performances. I’m specifically thinking of the children chanting something like “dam bab jocky jem” on They, some of the Hawaiian music background sounds on Wish I, and, perhaps most prominently missed it its absence, the violin strings from 24 (I get the feeling Jem agreed because she played “air violin” throughout the song).

The rest of her band was also excellent. At one point, when Jem was comparing Wales (the flag of which hung from the turntables during the concert) to the (American) South, the bass player launched into a spirited impromptu performance of “Sweet Home Alabama” which the rest of the band promptly picked up and performed. The same bass player also hid in the audience before the encore and jumped up on stage from there to surprise Jem. However my favorite part of the band’s performance was their how they syncronized jumping to the jamming of the chorus of 24. It made me want to jump all around with them.

As far as new songs, Jem did play one new slow-ish song that I think appears on one of her UK singles. I’m hoping it’s released on the iTunes Music Store soon. One related thing worth checking out on iTunes is the Jem: Josh Kelley Tour EP which contains two reworked versions of each artists songs. I can’t vouch for the Josh Kelly stuff but the acoustic version of They is excellent, and the Fatboy Slim Remix of Just a Ride is pretty good as well.

Aimee Mann (↪iTMS) & Keren Ann (↪iTMS)
Tribeca Performing Arts Center
November 20th

The opener Keren Ann was a soft-spoken songwriter of whimsical folk-influenced tunes. She live in NYC part of the year and Paris in the other, and has a whispery French accent that meshes with her music. She performed with a trumpet player who provided the background to most of her songs. Both her guitar work, and the trumpet often used a strong echoing reverb that characterized most of the music she played. Another thing I found interesting was how her songs would often alternate between extremely quiet parts where she would just be whispering into the microphone and barely plucking her guitar and much louder parts where she would be singing and playing very loudly. Definitely worth checking out if you like female vocalists or if French folk sounds interesting to you.

There seems to be something about New York that often causes tours to end here (of the 8 concerts I’ve seen in New York year, 4 have been the last date of the tour). I don’t know if it’s the geography or the fact that many musicians are from New York and so they want to end their tour at home or something completely different. In any case, I think it’s mostly a good thing, especially with Aimee Mann. After her band had come on stage and performed their first song, she talked a little bit about how it had been a long tour and since this was her last show she had a “what the fuck” attitude. This seemed to translate into a concert that was more impromptu that most performances I’ve seen. The best example of this came about half way through the concert when she announced that she would start taking requests for songs by notes scrawled on paper airplane, this, of course, generated a flood of paper folding among the audience. It was really neat to see her sort through all the notes and decide what to play. Another fun thing that she did was to jump in the air and then land jamming the final note of the song, which for some reason seemed old-school but was nevertheless fun to watch. However, my favorite moment of the concert was when she introduced Save Me, the single from the Magnoila soundtrack, as “the song that lost an Oscar to Phil Collins and his monkey-man music” (referring to Tarzan). This was greeted by loud cheering as the song seemed to be an audience favorite.

The entire concert was immensely enjoyable because of the excellent performance and wonderful energy Aimee and her band brought to the stage. More so than any concert I can remember attending, the band seemed to be interested in getting out on stage and giving it their full. For the encore Aimee ran back out on stage and proceeded to explain that the band is limited to ten minutes because the venue had to close at midnight. Then she started verbally going though a few songs that she could play, discarding some because they were too long, then she exclaimed into the microphone “God, now there’s only nine and a half minutes!” and proceeded to play three more songs with even more enthusiasm than before. It’s hard to define exactly one or two things that made the show so good, but I think it’s fair to say that in her 20+ years as a performing artist Aimee Mann has nearly perfected the art.

Bright Eyes (↪iTMS), Feist (↪iTMS), & The Magic Numbers (↪iTMS)
The Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre
November 25th

The Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre is an classic old movie theater with cushy red seats, a large foyer & balcony, and an extremely tall ceiling covered with all types of guided decorations. For you Southern Californians, it’s very similar to the Rialto Theater in South Pasadena, except it’s about three times as large, has good sound, and space between the rows of seats so your knees don’t touch the row. Unfortunately, it’s currently undergoing restoration, and it just so happened that the row that I was sitting in was little more than a line of folding chairs. Luckily, despite the fact that the concert had sold out, there was an open seat in the row across from me which I snagged after the first performance. Wow, what a difference it made; when I sat down I totally sunk into the thing. The theater (or theatre as they like to spell it) doesn’t normally host concerts, but I think Bright Eyes chose it for that very reason since he doesn’t play Clear Channel or other corporate venues. It was a bit of a challenge to get to from NYC since it’s across the river in Jersey City, but the PATH Train proved to be pretty easy to navigate.

The first band to play, The Magic Numbers, was from London and sounded a lot like an English version of the Charmparticles (which probably doesn’t mean much to anyone). They were a basic Brit-Pop band with lots of hand clapping an tambourine. Though I didn’t like their sound that much they did put on a pretty good performance.

Feist was next up on stage playing with a full band. She started with a rousing version of When I Was Young Girl with lots of extra reverb. She went on to play a variety of songs, including a new song that I didn’t recognize about someone tending a lighthouse while waiting for his/her lover to return. For this song she used two mics for her vocals. One was the normal mic, and the second was connected to a series of devices controlled by foot pedals. Feist used these to loop snippets of guitar and vocals to create a backing chorus of her own performance. If you’ve ever seen Howie Day (↪iTMS) live, it’s very similar to the effects he uses. Later in her performance, she did an amazing cover of Nina Simone’s See-Line Woman where she used the looping vocals. She followed this up with a version of Mushaboom with Bright Eyes and his band. This, of course, generated lots of high pitched screams from the teenaged females in the audience. For her encore, Feist started by quizzing the audience about if they had ever had their heart broken. She explained that she thought heartbreak was good since we grow from it and that we should seek out heartbreak rather than avoiding it because of this. Feist finished by playing the title track of her album Let it Die which is about a first heartbreak.

Overall I was amazed by Feist’s performance which gave a whole new dimension to her songs. She is a great performer and likes to joke around a bit with the audience between songs which made the whole experience lots of fun. My only disappointments were that she didn’t play One Evening or Leisure Suite, and I was really pissed at myself for missing her when she was in town for CMJ Marathon back in September. Luckily she’ll be back in town in February at Webster Hall which I definitely plan on going to see. It’s hard for me to emphasize enough how great her performance was, so instead of more flowery prose I found a live recording of her doing a solo show back in 2004 in Rotterdam. Unforunately the concert is in RealAudio format, but I did a little recording and was able to convert the whole concert into a bookmarked AAC file (.m4b), which I’ve put online for your downloading convenience. Get it here (25 MB). Note that this file is 27 minutes long should require iTunes 4.9 and QuickTime 7 or later to access the bookmarked tracks within the file (so you can jump to individual songs).

As for Bright Eyes, I’m not going to say much about him since I’m not very familiar with all his work (I just have his newest pair of albums). He was very drunk for the show and talked a lot about how he was having a nervous breakdown before the show but all the “beautiful people and music” made him feel much better. He had as many as 7 other performers on stage with him during his set playing a variety of instruments including 2 drum sets, a variety of synths, an electric piano, both electric & acoustic guitar, upright & electric base, harp, and trumpets. Conner spent most of the show on acoustic guitar except for Gold Mine Gutted, my favorite song of the set, where he played the electric piano. Though I didn’t know much of the music, I had quite a bit of fun watching him.