Year-end crunch time
Here it is, readers. The end of the year. And the end of an era. The end of 2009. And the end of December. The end of the rope. And the end of the week. The end of the line. And the end of the word “refrigerate.” The end of my last breath. And the end of a curtain that I thought about buying for my new apartment but ended up not purchasing because of space concerns and because I am a poor person. The end of the last meal I had. And the end of the first meal I had. The end of a circle. And the end of a square. The end of whoever is still reading this nonsense. And the end of my ability to hold a conversation. The end of that one song you wrote when you were 15 and thought that you “had a shot.” And the end of a cowbell that maybe has seen better days. The end of your pet iguana, Stevie Harbaugh. And the end of a box of Count Chocula. The end of a mushroom cap. And the end of this goddamn paragraph, finally.
This year was an interesting year for me, in terms of music-listening and concert-attending. Over the course of the first seven-and-a-half months of the year I saw 42 concerts (that’s including the latter half of the My Morning Jacket concert on New Year’s Eve — they had left the stage, and came back on just after midnight and played for an hour more; it counts) but since 23 August 2009, when I saw Radiohead in Prague, I have not been to a single concert, save for the odd ska-band-at-a-street-festival at 3:30 a.m. A sudden shift, but not a hugely difficult one. I wasn’t completely cut off from the show-going world, though — I did buy a pair of tickets for Pavement’s first reunion show in New York. Holler?
Let’s keep this post to the concerts. Later we’ll move on to other topics — albums, cheese, horseflies, &c, &c.
First, the bad.
Drawlings
21 January 2009, Bowery Ballroom
Any band opening for Animal Collective has the potential to be either great in a new and exciting way (Grouper) or awful in a new and unfortunate way (Drawlings). This performance included loops of a baby crying, which maybe sounded interesting in the conception (no pun intended) stage of the song but after four or five minutes of on-stage performance was just downright unpleasant listening.
Ratatat
23 April 2009, Terminal 5
I remember the first time I heard Ratatat (“Seventeen Years,” given to me on a mix cd in ninth or tenth grade) I thought they were pretty rad. My brother and I would play that song in the car and freestyle over it, and it was good. Four or five years later, though, I had come to realize that all their songs sound pretty much the same and they were popular enough that their concerts could be expected to be a big, sweaty mess (and not the good kind, like No Deachunter). I went anyway, because the Good King had decreed that it be so, but I turned out to be right, and the show consisted mostly of me shoving people and throwing apples and gargling salt water.
The Beets
3 July 2009, Bruar Falls
Have you ever heard of the Beets? This is a band that is awful. They are just as awful musically as the previous sentence is stylistically. Their songs just sound like someone’s little brother decided to make a racket and whine a lot. Probably you should just try to avoid them, if you can.
And now, the best. This list was a lot harder to make, but since I had three bad concerts I’ll keep the good to three as well.
David Byrne
27 February 2009, Radio City Music Hall
Talking Heads are one of the few bands my mother and I can agree are fantastic, and though they, along with most of the other bands in that élite club, no longer exist, David Byrne certainly does (all right, Tina, Jerry and Chris do, too), and thankfully he still performs their music live. I managed to get pretty good seats for this show, and it happened to be at a time when I was deep into a Talking Heads-loving period of my life. From the opening, oddly moving “Strange Overtones” to the rousing “Burning Down the House” that had me hopping joyfully like an Easter bunny on uppers to the closing cooldown of “Everything That Happens,” I had the time of my life at this show. For pure happiness, this was the best concert of my life.
Leonard Cohen
17 May 2009, Radio City Music Hall
A pretty different experience from David Byrne, and even more extraordinary. Before I went to the show, I had read glowing reviews of previous concerts on this tour, and to be honest I was a little skeptical. People were describing it as the best show they’d ever seen, and I wasn’t sure how that could be. The last truly great concert I had seen was David Byrne, and most of the other “greatest concerts of my life” had been great for similar reasons: kinetic exuberance and animated collective joy. While I loved Leonard Cohen’s oeuvre, his songs don’t exactly fit the bill for that kind of show. But it didn’t matter. This show, like the entire tour, was a celebration of one of the greatest artists of the past century, but it was much more than just a victory lap. It’s impossible to convey the majestic presence Leonard Cohen has onstage, which is partly why I couldn’t have imagined how powerful this concert was going to be. Seeing him sing, hearing that voice, you can’t help but to think that he believes wholly in whatever he’s saying and whatever he’s saying is the most important thing you could be hearing at that moment. He could read the back of a cereal box and make you think it was Keats. And while his singing and his talking aren’t too far apart these days, it doesn’t really matter — especially when the words are some of the greatest lyrics ever written.
(tie)
Signal performing Steve Riech’s Daniel Variations and Music for 18 Musicians
31 January 2009, Vassar College-Skinner Hall
Terry Riley, Kronos Quartet and Ensemble performing Terry Riley’s In C
24 April 2009, Carnegie Hall-Perelman Stage
All right, so these are two concerts, making four for the category. Did I promise to trim the list to three? Yes. Do I care about my promise? No. You just go ahead and deal with it. How am I supposed to pick just one great performance of a minimalist masterpiece? It’s just impossible. The Reich piece was great because I was close enough to see the expressions on the faces of the musicians, and they looked like they were having an incredible time, smiling at each other as they burned through Music for 18 Musicians like hypnotic bank robbers getting away with something huge. And In C was an incredible event, with Philip Glass and the composer himself (plus a couple of the guys from the National, for indie cred) among the 60-plus musicians on stage — not to mention the incredible music and spectacular sound that comes from such an assemblage of talent performing such an iconic piece at such an extraordinary venue. It simply would not be fair to exclude one of these two events.
But if I had to pick one, I’d go with the Vassar College performance — maybe because I like the piece better, maybe because it happened first, or maybe just because I like Reich’s baseball cap (he was at the performance, though not on stage) better than Riley’s beanie.
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