The latest in a cavalcade of American artists dropping by our sleepy little backwater town, St. Vincent played a set on Saturday night at YuYinTang as part of the JUE Festival. Accompanied by violinist/guitarist Daniel Hart, a dizzying array of pedals, and a handful of backing tracks, St. Vincent played a tight set of songs from her albums Marry Me and the latest, Actor.
To open the show, Boys Climbing Ropes came out rocked the place, firing off seven songs to get the crowd going. I have not seen them before (I know, I know, where have I been hiding?) but these guys have some catchy songs and the energy to rouse the masses. I especially liked their collective stage presence. The bassists, guitarist, and drummer have a wild, frenetic style. The lead singer stood planted center stage in some traffic-stopping neon tights, hands firmly on hips, eyes closed, and howled her way through the lyrics.
St. Vincent came on shortly after, and made it very clear throughout the set that she thinks Shanghai and her tour and everyone in the audience was “awesome.” I would like to reciprocate the compliment. St. Vincent is essentially Annie Clark, a 27 year old guitarist/singer/songwriter and whoever happens to be accompanying her. Clark and Hart fleshed out songs in intricate detail with the use of loops and sample sounds, and most of the songs began as simple melodies and ended up as huge arrangements with dozens of parts layered on top of each other. Most of the set followed this pattern, which made St. Vincent’s solo encore (solo as in, guitar and voice without additional looping or sounds), ‘Paris is Burning’, an interesting and affecting end to the show.
St. Vincent has musical chops to spare. Annie Clark is from Texas, and started playing guitar at 12, and writing and recording songs at just 13. Ms. Clark began her career as a guitarist in her early teens, touring with her aunt and uncle in a jazz band. After studying music for three years at the famous Berklee College of Music, she played guitar with the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens. In 2007, St. Vincent released her debut album Marry Me (the title is a playful reference to the cult sitcom Arrested Development). On top of being a phenomenal guitarist, Ms. Clark has a lovely, jazzy vocal style that compliments her songs. Her singing voice, which can veer towards Disney Princess territory, makes a great counterpoint to some the darker imagery that comes up in songs like “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood” and “Marrow”.
St. Vincent has stated that she composed her album Actor purely on the computer, and only after writing did she come back to arrange the songs for a band. The songs reflect their theoretical origins in their intricacy and precision, and it was extremely impressive to hear Clark and Hart work together to create such deep arrangements. At times, due to the complexity and the many layers of sounds that create the songs, St. Vincent’s set leaned towards more of a cerebral examination of sonic textures than just a regular rock show. It’s the kind of music that requires some serious listening.
During the set, some of my favorite moments came when Annie Clark took a little breathing space in the arrangements. Annie rocked back slightly, closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, and proceeded to shred.
You are on horseback, coming to the end of a long journey, traveling under an infinite and empty blue sky. You pull your fur kaftan closer for warmth; the sun is bright but the wind is bitter. After days of riding on the expanse of Mongolian steppe, you finally catch sight of a cluster of tents on the horizon. As you approach you are welcomed into a white yurt and handed a draught of milk wine as your hosts sing a “Toast Song”.
OK, this is all some elaborate fantasy I made up, having recently watched that Genghis Kahn biopic. Hanggai, the stellar Mongolian rock band, is actually headquartered in Beijing, not in a ger 500 kilometers outside of Ulaanbatar. The band’s founding member, Ilchi, started out in a successful punk band before becoming enamored with traditional Mongolian singing, studying Mongolian music and meeting two horse-hair fiddle players in Inner Mongolia. The band certainly captures a sound many of us have not been exposed to before: Deep throat-singing layered with higher pitched vocals that create otherworldly overtones, rich fiddle melodies and rousing hand-drums. With extraordinary instrumentation and lyrics (and stage banter!) in Mongolian, it’s a testament to the talent and charisma of this band that any audience that sees them, Han, ex-pat, whatever, falls under their spell. Hanggai, you can invade my territory any day.
March 12th, Friday night we were treated to a sublime set by Hanggai at YuYinTang, brought by Split Works as part of their JUE Festival. The house was packed with hardcore fans who knew all the lyrics, as well as some interested parties who had heard the hype and wanted to hear what Mongolian music is all about. The audience has certainly grown since Hanggai last came to Shanghai in November. For the start of the show I set myself up next to a superfan who spoke Mongolian, and loudly translated the stage banter to her Shanghainese friend. “This is a song welcoming a stranger to your home and offering drinks!” she said. That song, “Toast Song”, also happened to be the song Hanggai played three times during the show, each repetition getting louder as the audience picked up on the lyrics and rowdier as the empty Tsingtao bottles filled every available surface.
Hanggai uses three vocalists to create their multi-textured sound, but the lead singer can certainly charm a crowd without the help. With a sly smile, epic mullet, and clear appreciation for the audience enthusiasm, he chatted with the audience between songs and performed the most awesome, flowing bird-like dance this writer has ever seen.
I must digress for a moment to talk about the pacing of Hanggai’s show. The band started with a brief, forty minute set of slow, bluesy numbers (including my favorite song, “Vagabond/Yuan Zuo de Ren”). Hanggai certainly took their time building up songs, creating lush and melancholic ballads featuring the horse-hair fiddle, or singing long passages acapella. Honestly, I loved every minute, but YuYinTang was packed and the crowd was chomping at the bit waiting for Hanggai to speed it up and rock out. Hanggai finally recognized the Friday night party atmosphere and brought out “Toast Song”, a peppy number with relatively simple lyrics and parts where we can all shout “Hey!” together. The band took a twenty minute break and returned with another hour of tunes to get our blood pumping.
The atmosphere at YuTinTang was, as Layabozi’s illustrious Chilean matriarch put it, “Super wild!” The crowd danced and sang along with the lyrics, although very few of us could understand them or recite them accurately. Some of the faster songs got a bit of a mosh pit going front and center; the friendly vertical leap kind as opposed to the full contact kind.
It’s inspiring to know that through the revolution and upheaval of China’s recent history, there are musicians enthralled with this traditional music, who chose to learn it and capture it through their pop music lens and tour with it. There is a place for the traditional in modern China. And for all their stage presence and traditional sounds, Hanggai still writes catchy rock tunes that can attract and move Shanghai’s modern cosmopolitan crowd. I cannot wait until these guys come back to Shanghai to throw another party.
The first album by Broken Bells, a self-titled collaboration between The Shins’ James Mercer and Brian Burton (AKA Danger Mouse), came out on March 9th. To my ears, it is the best release of 2010 thus far.
Let’s learn a a bit about the principles. James Mercer is best known as the lead guy in The Shins, who have been making albums since 1997. They are recognized for the song “New Slang”, their contribution to the Garden State Soundtrack. It is a crazy good track and fit perfectly with that movie. Some people like to talk smack about the Garden State Soundtrack now, but at the time it was pretty big. Grammy, anyone? (Not that Grammies really mean anything anymore. I’ll grant you that.) I still like that song, though.
Danger Mouse’s biography will take a little more time. He started out as an electronic artist in Athens, Georgia. The first thing that most people heard about Danger Mouse was that in 2004 he took the genres of hip hop, pop, and mash-ups and shattered them all. Then, he picked up the pieces and turned them into a sonic mosaic called The Grey Album. The piece was a mixture of samples culled from the Beatles’ White Album overlaid by acappella rhymes from Jay-Z’s Black Album. In addition to shattering genres, this sound piece actually broke my brain.
From there, Danger Mouse has done a lot of other collaborations and racked up production credits like a tweaked-out pinball wizard with a studio: producer on the Gorillaz Demon Days album (the good one); half of the “Crazy” popular duo, Gnarls Barkley; a collaboration with MF Doom called DangerDoom (inventive, guys); production for indie rockers The Black Keys; and production on Beck’s album Modern Guilt. To say that’s a pretty nice resume would be like saying Susan Boyle kind of looks like a dude; Susan Boyle TOTALLY looks like a dude, and that is a GREAT resume. (Parenthetically, can I just add here that it is awesome that I can type “Susan Boyle looks like a dude” into a search engine and instantly have my choice of images? Done and done. Back to the review.)
Some of Danger Mouse’s projects come off as just an album by the artist, produced by Danger Mouse. The Beck album would come to mind as one fitting in this category. Still other Danger Mouse projects turn into equal partnerships where each party brings something to the table and the pieces coalesce into something new and awesome, like Gnarls Barkley. Broken Bells would fall into the latter category.
As legend has it, the pair met backstage at a music festival in 2004 and hit it off. They wanted to work together, but it didn’t happen for another four years. The project started off as a secret, but blog world got wind of it last year and we have been waiting for the release since then. Now it’s here.
The album is essentially a pop album with extras; the songs are built around guitar and drum sounds, with layered bits of Danger Mouse magic interspersed at just the right intervals. In an interview on NPR’s All Songs Considered, the duo intimated that these sounds were influenced by the instruments in Danger Mouse’s LA studio (electric harpsichord, Hammond organ, etc.), as well as instruments they bought together, like a special Fender 6 guitar they used extensively and whose distinct sound gives some of the songs an Ennio Morricone-like quality (if you’re not familiar with Morricone, think Spaghetti Western soundtracks. He’s the one who made them.)
The song many people heard before the release of the album was the advance single, “The High Road”, released last December. It is also the first track on the album. This is a catchy song with a steady, mid-tempo beat, as well as a singalong ending refrain: “It’s too late to change your mind/ You let laws be your guide.” Actually, Mercer leaves it a bit ambiguous and sometimes I can’t tell if he says “guide” or “God,” which is cryptically cool. Danger Mouse surreptitiously scatters sounds about like so many stars, frosting the song with a trail of vapor dust.
The next great song on Bells is a doozy. “The Ghost Inside” is uber-simple and funky, with a very spare electric beat that hardly changes, a few sparse hand claps, some synthesizer, guitar, and Mercer’s terrific vocal. During this song he switches from a falsetto yowl during the verses, to a mid-range plea for the choruses, and finally to a deeper, conversational cadence during the breakdowns. This performance gives a repetitive song perceived diversity and makes it into one of the top bangers on the album.
“October” is anthemic; it reminds me of a drunken piano player in an old country western saloon. You know, the one who gets shot by a stray bullet when the card game goes awry. It’s sad like that, but beautiful at the same time, like one of those sultry fall days, when it feels like winter will never come. That’s nice imagery for one song to evoke.
Those are my favorite songs on Bells. Now for some short cuts:
The story on “Sailing to Nowhere” is the beautiful piano and string arrangement that adorns this aching waltz. You know when someone kisses their fingers and then splays them up into the air, saying “Magnifique!” like a French chef? This is the aural equivalent of that.
“Citizen” is a hipster robot, programmed to destroy. ‘Nuff said, right? Admit it, you can totally picture that song now. It’s not just lazy writing.
“Mongrel Heart” sounds like a creepy new wave song. It should have a video where the band is drawn in illustrations and then steps through a portal that turns them into real men with bad haircuts.
“The Mall and the Misery” has the epitome of the aforementioned “Morricone sound” at its beginning and then turns into an urgent car chase-type track. I would definitely play this song on the car stereo if I was ever on the run from the cops, careening down alleys and over hills, sparks and body parts flying. It sounds just like that, it really does. This one has some badass guitar riffs.
I neglected to mention a couple of the tracks, including “Vaporize”, “Your Head is on Fire”, and “Trap Doors” on purpose. I think “Vaporize” is actually going to be the next single. It’s a good song. It’s not that I don’t like these cuts, they just didn’t grab me, so they don’t get mentioned. Every album has a couple of throwaway tracks, although I’m sure the artists would object to me calling them that. It’s not that I don’t think they should be on the album, though. Every great album needs a couple of downers to accentuate the greatness of the others. That’s just the way it is.
And this is a great album, from a band that is just getting started. Although the songs from the album were done in the studio by Mercer and Danger Mouse alone, they have formed a band and are headed out on the road soon, starting with that mythical musical wonderland that I never get to go to, South by Southwest Fest. In the future they will be available for more bookings, so, Splitworks, STD, let’s make it happen!
In the meantime, you, the listener should get this album and listen to it. A lot. They even have a $40 Deluxe Edition with ultra-neato stuff like artwork and glow-in-the-dark stickers! The box of the CD plays an unreleased track when you open it, like a post-modern music box! If I still bought CDs I would so totally be there! But, I don’t! But I’m still listening! And so should you! I can’t stop using exclamation points!
I’ve been trying to convince my work to switch over to a four-day workweek. It’s been shown to improve employee efficiency and effectiveness, as well as control costs. Actually, I don’t care about any of that. I just want to be able to wild out on Thursday without having to wake up early the next day. This is because Thursday has already become the precursor to the weekend and musicians in the city have been taking that prelude and running with it.
For instance, last week. DJ Vadim and Yarah Bravo were on hand at The Source store to give an insight into their creative process with a workshop and Q&A. It was actually an uncomfortable setting, but it turned into something better for us later on. Why was it uncomfortable? Well, some people decided to take it as a social occasion and insisted on chattering aimlessly during the whole thing. This was mixed with the problem of a less-than-booming PA system at The Source, which combined to make it pretty damn impossible to hear what the artists were saying. Then people started to get agitated at the talkers and admonish them on the microphone, but their admonitions were ignored, which made things doubly awkward. So it wasn’t the greatest thing to behold.
However, things got better when everyone left because Benoit from Free the Wax set up a private interview with the pair for Layabozi. We sat down to talk and it became obvious that Vadim and Yarah could not be any nicer or more expressive. The interview went down and then we proceeded to have another unrecorded conversation for an hour. I was asking him about everybody in hip hop I could think of and he was happy to tell me everything I wanted to know. He’s a really smart and well-traveled guy, but at the same time humble and funny. He even bestowed upon me my new MC name- Deadly Silence. We eventually got onto the subject of the fall of the United States empire and, inevitably, like all empires, the conversation ended.
We went to see Gary Wang and a soul set at The Shelter, which was made more enjoyable by the band there, which included Asaph on guitar, piano, and vocals, along with electric beats. I enjoyed the whole thing; awesome records were played after the live set and it was a cool night. Shelter really has good stuff going on most of the time. I still have yet to check out The Swap Meet, but I will do it, although I don’t have a turntable. I just want to see what’s on hand.
And that was just Thursday!
Friday night I had a good time at the Local King show going down at Mao. The atmosphere was great because it was a free show and totally packed out. There is something great about a packed out show at Mao, that’s why I hope it survives. When you are there with all those people you just feel a collective energy that amplifies the vibe of the bands. The bands (Pinkberry, whom I missed, Candy Shop, Sonnet, and Boys Climbing Ropes) were just OK, except for Boys Climbing Ropes, who seem to do well no matter what the stage, but it was really the vibe in the place that won me over.
Saturday night I went out to see St. Vincent, for which I was really excited. This little lady has a control of the guitar, as well as a tremendously beautiful voice. She brought along a violinist and they managed to do justice to many of the tracks off of her Actor album and also threw in a couple other numbers. Good show. More on that show from Emma later on.
It was a good weekend of music, thanks to Free the Wax for Vadim, Splitworks for St. Vincent and the ongoing JUE Fest, and Jagermeister (WTF?) for the Local King show. Good job, guys. Keep it coming.
There’s so much music going on! Knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do could help you this weekend.
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Layabozi is a web magazine about music in Shanghai today, with a sprinkle of the extra-mural and a tart sassiness—without ever being cloying. We take our inspiration from the snack which is both exotic (to us) and down home, and from which we take our name: Spicy Duck Necks.
The songs posted in this website are for analysis purposes only. We, the contributors, love - deeply - music and we work to support the artists we love by promoting and purchasing their work; it is our policy only to post what we own or what the artists/owners have authorized us to publish. Through this site, we're simply sharing music with others hoping they will also support these artists and appreciate the quality of their work. We encourage everyone to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel deserve your money and energy. If you own the copyright to one of the songs posted on this website and would like it removed, please let us know we'll respond fast as a the wind. We do not keep an archive of our songs. And we do take obsessive care of our records, cassettes, cd's, dvd's, videos, books, autographs, photos and old tickets to concerts we loved.
Feel free to contact us if you are a band, label or distributor and think we'd be interested in your music. Same goes if you're playing a gig in either Shanghai, China, Asia, Gaia, or outer space and want us to come.
The latest in a cavalcade of American artists dropping by our sleepy little backwater town, St. Vincent played a set on Saturday night at YuYinTang as part of the JUE Festival. Accompanied by violinist/guitarist Daniel Hart, a dizzying array of pedals, and a handful of backing tracks, St. Vincent played a tight set of songs from her albums Marry Me and the latest, Actor.
St. Vincent has musical chops to spare. Annie Clark is from Texas, and started playing guitar at 12, and writing and recording songs at just 13. Ms. Clark began her career as a guitarist in her early teens, touring with her aunt and uncle in a jazz band. After studying music for three years at the famous Berklee College of Music, she played guitar with the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens. In 2007, St. Vincent released her debut album Marry Me (the title is a playful reference to the cult sitcom Arrested Development). On top of being a phenomenal guitarist, Ms. Clark has a lovely, jazzy vocal style that compliments her songs. Her singing voice, which can veer towards Disney Princess territory, makes a great counterpoint to some the darker imagery that comes up in songs like “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood” and “Marrow”.
During the set, some of my favorite moments came when Annie Clark took a little breathing space in the arrangements. Annie rocked back slightly, closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, and proceeded to shred.
