I saw Azita open up for Stephen Malkmus at Irving Plaza in New York several years ago. Malkmus was terrific — all drawl and solos, and I can’t get that floppy bowl cut he wore out of my mind — but it was Azita who stayed with me until long after the show was over. I was struck by her singing, edgy and free and swooping in and around vowels, scooping out vowels with an unpolished spoon. Sharp and flat in the right ways, like Astrud Gilberto; moving in and around her head voice, from nasal to back of throat to everywhere else, lending her voice this totally distinctive elasticity. And those melodies — they completely insinuated themselves in me by show’s end, winding and complex, knotted, beguiling. I bought the LP “Enantriodromia” soon after.

I haven’t listened to the album in probably 8 months. So when I put it in this evening — it’s still playing now — I had this thrill, this shock of glad recognition. Don’t you love that? When you realize a forgotten record has burrowed deeply into you, into strata you had no idea it had possessed the power to penetrate. Maybe its her melodies — I believe that part of the power of a well-constructed, complex melody is its capacity to imprint the brain more deeply, sink down into its trenches, its Marianas, like a kind of tremendous galleon, sink down and stay there for centuries, attracting kelp and wolf eels and endless glittering shoal. Like Van Dyke Parks’ melodies, like Brian Wilson melodies, like certain melodies of Debussy or that of Chopin’s ‘Barcarolle’… the density of the melody helps it anchor down in the peat of the brain, slowly effervescing up through the soil, leaking good rust for months and years, blooming, ripening, gaining emotional power.

I love this record. I love her honest voice, honest and open like Oldham’s, Guthrie’s. Simple despite its restlessness and leaps and changes in timbre. I particulary dig “Birds”, its buoyant scatted passage, its arresting chord change right at “Birds have grown up singing in the trees”. I love her piano playing, instinctive and serving well those endlessly-surprising slanted harmonies of hers. Tons of extended chords, diminished chords, so much tension and suspension that so richly satisfies and never feels confrontational or difficult for the sake of it: a kind of dancing slowly and to one side, with unusual but necessary bodily contortions, like a kind of aural Butoh.

This record is a spell: long and hypnotic incantations, multiple languages, strange symbols woven into the air, complex results that reveal themselves in time. Letting this record into you is like waking up one day in a house of gordian-knotted ribbon and vine; such rare pleasure in stretching your limbs, admiring the whorling braids, pulling it all in and over you like blankets.
   

AZITA’s Offical Website

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

A man in the corner rattled a horn.

Another man with a long braided beard-tail carried a cymbal on a rope. He let it brush against the floor and shivered it there, giving the room some shimmery metal hiss. Sometimes he’d use his feet to play with it and pick it up. Then he would hover it and swing it, slowly & carefully, with purpose. Like you would wave and shake a censer.

This man would walk back through the seated crowd sometimes, through the aisle, not in confrontation, but just as you would move your arms in a stretch and kick your feet out in a stretch because you want to uncoil.

A woman flailed against a piano, her palms rapidly striking blocks of keys. Sometimes she slapped a cymbal. I think I saw her on the floor.

Another man played drums. What he played was sturdy and necessary. A frame for wild ivy to grow in and around.

They kept moving and changing position. They kept bringing out different drums, different instruments. Their restlessness soothed. Restless the way birds seem. Constant motion without tension.

Sounds emerged and died over time, naturally and without fuss. Guitar sounds, percussive sounds, breathy pants and moaning sounds, organ-like keyboard rumbles. All of it shifting in and out of place naturally and imperceptibly, like a star fading as dawn begins to glow, like leaves of certain tropical plants turning to face or unface the sun.

The music they brought was not a song, it was without beginning or end, it was like a jungle waterfall you approach, sit beside, feel the rushing misty balm of, and then leave behind: it was falling before you got there and it will keep falling when you’re gone. It doesn’t care about you and at the same time will always need a witness.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009
   

No Neck’s Myspace

   

Soundatone Records [order No Neck stuff here]

    (Photo credit to red nails, wrongcity)
   
     

      “Hungry Saw” was not a favorite Tindersticks record of mine when it was released. Aside from abut three or four cuts, it struck me as a very respectable effort which suffered from mediocre performances & material in its first half and which was lopsidedly rich in emotion and re-playability in its second. No Curtains, but what the hell is?
      But last night, live, the record — which they played in its entirety aside from a middle suite of older material and an encore — ripened and grew into itself, lent strength by the urgency of the band’s delivery. Terry Edwards and the brass/woodwinds accompaniments in general helped the songs reach intense emotional swells of force only hinted at in studio. And Stuart with his slight bodily stutter, his seductive and slightly-medicated sway, his maracas-shaking rhythm-keeping, helped fulfill each “Hungry Saw” song to what was promised on record.
      I recognized many of the songs as if for the first time, like people who I’d seen through rainy windows. “Yesterdays Tomorrows” is a good example, lent drama onstage which never hit me on LP. “E-type” too was so amped with swagger & sheer drive. “Boobar”, a favorite of mine on record, emerged stronger live as well — the band storming out of the hushed bridges, jovial and grinning at one another, mastering the song’s swells in and out of hush and gentleness.
      Total truism, but this is why seeing music live matters. To see loved songs not so much transformed as fulfilled, like sketches blooming with color before your eyes — to have your later listenings enriched with memory, as if memory was another instrument, another section in the orchestra — there aren’t words for that magic.
      My only disappointment is the continued absence of Dickon Hinchcliffe [I think it was your standard creative-differences split between he and Staples, but not sure] — or some other live violin player capable of rounding out the Tindersticks’ sound with some of Hinchcliffe’s gorgeous arrangements. Hinchcliffe’s contributions to the band’s sound were enormous, defining — and I miss his touch on “Hungry Saw”, I miss his baroque and anguished lines, his dissonances, his sweep and pathos, and his soulful vocal lines on “Waiting for the Moon” and “Can our Love…”. Still, they did a hell of a job live trying to patch over the hole left by his leaving.

      Other things I remember –

      “My Oblivion”, that swoony crescendoing opiate, a little edgier than on record, absolute fucking lotus.
     
      “My Sister” — I song I never expected to hear live — played with a palpable sense of discovery and spell-casting by the ensemble, especially the delicate otherwordly percussion in the beginning, and that pindrop-hush interlude — the “orange and mustard planets” passage — executed as it needs to be: with wonder, tragedy, enchantment.
     
      Stuart’s gentle, endearing, half-lidded way with the audience and with his band; his searing, brief solos and tremolo-bar chords at the end of “Her”.
     
      What a band. By turns morose, noirish, soul crooning & fanfaring; day of the dead, lullaby gondola-sway, flamenco explosive, carny wobble; raking up love’s gutters and tambourining amid the refuse.
     
      What does everyone else think? Who went?

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

Here’s what I remember:

Timed strips of vertical light that glowed hot,
like radioactive piano keys.

Avey’s hunching shoulders, his face scrunching up and widening out,
contracting and dilating as emotion hit him, like a pupil responding to light.
His hoots and barks and punctuating shouts.

Geologist’s spelunker light while he bobbed like a boxer. In front of his wires & equipment, reminding me of a surgeon seen over forceps & tubes and an open chest.

Panda Bear’s big fluffed christmasy sweater, his tender vocals, the way he surprised me by how hard he came down on his drumset, like axes on stumps.

And their sound, all that good wide-eyed flushed swirl lathering up my brain, cleaning it up with kind hands, kind but also startling with its mass and power: Hiss of waves. Propellers. Inhalations. Tropics, crowded bazaars, arguments, coos, marina wave laps and boats leaving. All of it balm, and a little painful at the same time, like scratches on your back.

“Fireworks” and its flangy percussion holding it together like a spine, a long perforated spine, and its melody, its chorus’s wordless melody curving around like a desert snake, curling around and up and down, restless, a gusted ribbon.

“Comfy in Nautica” for the encore, saturating the air with its mantra, the refrain building and building, the sound massing, like children making a sandcastle that’s big enough to scream and sleep in, a soft cathedral built up in you, from outside you.

And all the people around me, glad and dancing, loud & full of thanks.

   
   

After, I was a little raw, almost sad. I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t because it was over, or too short, or anything like that.

I decided that a show like this can leave you raw, longing for something undefinable. It can peel you back like fruit. As if music was a paring knife, skinning you. A knife with prayers and poems etched in the handle.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

I saw Ponytail at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday. On the way home, I walked into the N/R Canal train station, and saw:

I watched these hieroglyphs, let their untranslatable code broadcast to me, tattoo my brain, ignoring the impulse to make it all mean. They impacted me, in a way I can’t articulate, those blue wriggles, shapes, lines; their motion, design. I stood there a long time, happy.

It was much like what I had just seen onstage at the Knit: Ponytail’s Molly Siegel reveling in pure throated sound — no discernible words, just grinning yowl. Relieving me of the need for mouthed sound to mean, to be locked in language. The band’s restless tumult lodging in a wild knot inside me, unraveling throughout my torso in warm ribbons.

Seeing Ponytail live tosses the reins of reason out of your hands, suspends thought, replaces it with inarticulate joy.

I stood in the pit & let sound & shout dapple me, like I was a giant window collecting thousands of multicolored leaves, asking not to be washed, becoming such wild autumn.

Four bands played Mercury Lounge last night: War on Drugs, Abe Vigoda, Ponytail, and Titus Andronicus (in that order). One band was just competent, one veered from boring to embarrassing, and the other two made me deeply, ecstatically grateful to have ears & eyes.

I won’t waste much time on the two bands that didn’t much move me (sorry Titus & W.O.D. fans) — the net’s clogged full of enough art-venom and musicblog-spew as it is. If an artist has at least a small talent and some passion, no matter how misguided or tired the product is, least I can do is hold back on snark and say (next to) nothing at all. Let blogo-Sneerers do the rest.

Abe V came on second. I was all grins as the L.A. foursome powered into their set with spiky change-up prunk. Love the delay & reverb on the rhythm guitar, the disjunct & nervy lead lines, the elemental, fragmented imagery & hail of language (”men from the boys I’m a girl I’m a tree”, “hope is a white hand that moves through my body”), and the drumming, the drumming, the drumming. With all the hyper time changes this band puts your ear through, it’s important for them to have someone behind a drumset who can lead the time spasms — and Vigoda’s drummer, Reggie Guerrero, does. He’s the band’s calm, focused storm-eye. Such a kinetic set. Left my ears in static blizzard and my feet sore from bouncing.

Ears & feet got no rest once Ponytail came on. If yr gush-sensitive, stop reading now, since anything I say about this band is going to seem ridiculously hyperbolic unless you’ve seen Molly Siegel, beaming & transported, her face alive with expressions as wild and uninhibited as the band’s raucous-joyous assault — her vocal chords too, swooping all over wordless terrain — and her body facing you in half-crouch stance, mixing challenge & grateful embrace of the band’s sound with arms held out, palms up.

Arms out, palms up. Like she’s offering her band’s galeforce sound out of her body to you in some giant neon yarn-boulder — or summoning the same from the sky to catch. Ponytail made me really fucking glad to be alive. If you want a band to tornado you into exhaustion and then smile really sweetly over your panting body, find these folks in a town near you & come ready to play. You’ll be shaky with wild magic; you’ll be ready to pull teats down from clouds & make them give up their secret mango milk.

Hope is a white hand.
Arms out, palms up.
   

Hear Ponytail: www.myspace.com/jreamteam
Hear Abe Vigoda: www.myspace.com/abevigoda
Hear Titus Andronicus: www.myspace.com/titusandronicus
Hear War on Drugs: www.myspace.com/thewarondrugs

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008