GOD & A BOTTLE

I have a long post half-done about how much I love the KRS-One/Marley Marl collabo Hip-Hop Lives, but I’m wondering if I should wait for the pans to start rolling in (and they will!) before I rush to its defense.

This weekend was busy and full of music and I have many things to say, so here we go.

Friday night I reviewed the first of seven sold-out Bright Eyes shows for Newsday. I was seated in the same row as Jon Pareles, who was also reviewing the show, and realized that is never going to stop making me completely lose my cool. Except for the part when Lou Reed came out and they played “Dirty Blvd.,” (which is only one of the best Lou Reed songs ever), the show was one big mess. I don’t think you need to have fourteen people on stage ever, especially when three of those people are drummers. The songs were arranged within an inch of their lives, as if by making them BIGGER Conor was hoping to make them feel more important. Gillian Welch & David Rawlings opened with nothing but their guitars and their voices and handily blew him off the stage.

This is in keeping with the spirit of Bright Eyes, which is all GRAND GESTURE and BIG SENTIMENT WRIT LARGE. I wish he’d play it a bit closer to the vest, because his smaller moments — like “Lua” and especially “First Day of My Life” — are wrenching and lovely. I play these songs and I realize what Conor Oberst coud be, but then he goes and writes things like “The red carpetbagger makes a Blackberry call/ to the plastic piranhas in the city of salt,” and I’m back to being completely pissed by him (though to be fair, that line is probably not any worse than “your streetcar visions/ which you place in the grass). I know a lot of people who have the ability to siphon out lyrics entirely — I wish I had that gift.

(Related: a few weeks ago I reviewed Z100’s Zootopia, but I thought the review came out kind of awful, so I was in no big rush to link it.)

Saturday I got to see My Teenage Stride, who remain criminally underrated. Ears Like Golden Bats is a perfect pop record, a masterful distillation of the Flying Nun sound with little gestures towards the Go-Betweens and early R.E.M. It’s already one of my favorite records of the year, and if you go for wry lyrics and crystalline tangles of guitar, well, it’s going to be one of yours, too. Jed Smith is one of America’s best pop songwriters, precisely because he doesn’t write things in big bold capitals. If he were to do a sold-out seven-night stint at Town Hall his guest would be Robert Scott and they’d do “Block of Wood.”

Which essentially gets us to Sunday and the whole reason I’m posting tonight. Sunday I got to see Brand New — not on assignment, because I wanted to. I genuinely love this band, especially The Devil & God…, which I somehow overlooked until last month. I went to the show expecting to be surrounded by grouchy 17 – 24 year old Hot Topic shoppers (which is getting to be fairly common company for me), but instead was sort of disgusted to end up at some kind of festival of douchebaggery. It was like living in the flash animation on the Abercrombie homepage — tons of dudes in backwards caps wayyyy too drunk for 8:30pm doing lots of bro-fives and slamming their chests into one another. This is completely at odds with the bands music, which is sprawling and dark and kind of complicated and not at all driven by testosterone. I don’t think anyone gets laid in Brand New songs, unless you count Jesus getting laid in the tomb somewhere near the middle of the new record. But anyway: frontman Jesse Lacey comes out and starts playing a ballad on acoustic guitar which is actually terrifyingly fragile and raw and I’m really taken by it when the dude next to me gets a cell phone call which he proceeds to answer. Relative silence in the Bowery Ballroom when the guy next to me in a normal conversational voice goes: “Yo. What’s Up. Yeah. I’m at the Brand New Concert. What are you up to?”

That whole weird tension was in the air all night, and it bottomed out when Lacey brought the female vocalist from Colour Revolt on stage to duet with him on “Play Crack the Sky” and some dude yelled out “TAKE YOUR TOP OFF.”

Which is roughly the point I realized that this band is completely fucked. They should be starting to pick up Tool fans in training, kids who go in for commercial rock that’s a little more heady and complicated, but they’re never ever going to. Most people think of them as an emo band, which means they’re going to be stuck with a whole lot of fans who only want to hear the old stuff, and are never going to pick up any fans who might actually like what they’re doing now because said potential fans would never think to look to a Brand New record to fulfill their musical longing. Which basically means The Devil & God… (whose title, by the way, derives from something Daniel Johnston said) is going to go mostly ignored, and Jesse Lacey is going to be left belting out Neutral Milk Hotel covers for no one.

I guess I get antsy because Brand New is the kind of band whose cause I will instantly take up — a young band with quick commercial success who’s trying to do something new and interesting in a way that’s not pretentious or overworked or unbearably Oberst-like, but no one’s going to pay attention. They ended Saturday’s show with a riveting version of “Jesus Christ” (aka the best Modest Mouse song that Modest Mouse never wrote, the single art to which, by the way, might look familiar to you Jesus Lizard fans). Halfway through, the guy in front of me could be heard to remark “Yeah, I like the old stuff better.”