I’ve only just recently gotten around to hearing the new Liars record, Sisterworld and I’m actually a little surprised this album isn’t getting more attention. I’m a big Liars fan and have loved everything they’ve done (even the witch record) and I think that Sisterworld may be the the most successful record Liars have made in terms of combining both their rhythmic, arty mood pieces with their more straight-up, distorted guitar-based songs. In fact, if I was going to introduce someone to Liars, it might be Sisterworld I’d give them first.

Scissor, Scarecrows On A Killer Slant, and Proud Evolution are all amazing songs and sit up there with Liars best. And, as so often is the case with Liars, there is a strong narrative core to the record which (again as always) takes a bit of work to decipher. But Liars always benefit from repeated listens and Sisterworld continues to get better every time I listen. If you were one of the many who gave up on Liars years ago, maybe give them another shot.

Download
Liars – Scissor

Liars are playing Venue here in Vancouver on Friday for an early show. I cannot wait. Hopefully I can make it a doubleheader with the Japandroids gig at Lifetime Collective later on.

The National have a new record coming out on May 11 called High Violet. A few people are looking forward to it. The band will be touring all over the place this summer including a date here in Vancouver at the Malkin Bowl on September 10. Tickets on sale Friday.

I highly recommend reading this New York Times feature on The National. It’s a good thing these guys are all old friends or I think The National would have self-destructed a while back. You can also stream the entire record there. You can also download two tracks from High Violet below.

Download
The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio
The National – Afraid Of Everyone

Early last year The National released a song that included lyrics about Pavement getting back together. AND THEN THEY DID. The National can see the future, people. I’ve been waiting patiently for a Vancouver show announcement and it’s finally arrived: on September 7 Pavement will be playing the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. The original link on Ticketmaster has disappeared (maybe this isn’t 100%?) but if I recall tickets were meant to go on sale May 1. The date is still listed here.

Now we just need Broken Social Scene to swing around one more time.

Sally Seltmann (The Artist Formerly Known As New Buffalo) has a new album out on Arts & Crafts called Heart That’s Pounding. While I can’t say I love the entire record, there are a couple songs that are pretty special. Harmony To My Heartbeat is one of the sweetest, shiniest, pop songs of the year and On The Borderline isn’t far behind. If you’re feeling like crap (and don’t mind your music verging on overly saccharine) check out this record. Sally Seltmann is peddling all kinds of joy.

Download
Sally Seltmann – On The Borderline

Watch – Harmony To My Heartbeat

Last night at the Coachella Festival in California, Thom Yorke wrapped up his solo tour with his new, fun-times band Atoms For Peace. Over the course of the tour, Thom trotted out a few new (presumably) Radiohead songs, including one which had never been played before. He also played some Radiohead material in stripped down acoustic/piano mode (including Airbag, Fog, Everything In Its Right Place) in addition to the entirety of the The Eraser and both sides of last year’s Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses 12″.

And then one night in Oakland, Atoms For Peace covered Joy Division. I really dig Thom Yorke’s surprisingly decent Ian Curtis impression.

Download
Thom Yorke – Love Will Tear Us Apart (alt. link)

Awesome.

At the Deerhunter/Spoon show on Sunday I finally picked up Deerhunter’s Cryptograms on vinyl. In addition to it being a great album on its own, it comes packaged with the Fluorescent Grey EP as well. That’s four sides of spacey brilliance. While I love Microcastle and Weird Era, I really enjoy the more droney, psychedelic first half of Cryptograms and would love another Deerhunter record that incorporated more of those elements.

Deerhunter – Strange Lights

Deerhunter – Lake Somerset

Speaking of vinyl, it was Record Store Day today. Some friends joined Amanda and I as we wandered around Main Street to check out Red Cat Records and Neptoon Records before heading downtown to Scratch (sorry Zulu, didn’t make it over your way today). All those shops and I came home empty-handed. The only exclusive I saw that really tempted me (other than the rather pricey Wilco Kicking Television box set) was Pavement’s Quarantine The Past exclusive Record Store Day version. But I resisted.

The most exciting Record Store Day exclusive, in my mind, was a UK only release for a brand new Blur single called Fool’s Day. The band are doing something pretty cool though for those of us who didn’t land one of the 1000 copies by giving away the single for free on their website. Go forth and download now. (I’ve heard that the mp3 version is cut off before the end though so download the .wav file and convert it yourself). Maybe the more times we download it from the Blur website the more encouraged they will be to make a record?

The XX started behind a sheer, white sheet with backlighting projecting their shadows to the audience as they played, appropriately enough, Intro. From those first moments on stage, The XX totally had me. Sure, the live versions of their songs, for the most part, don’t add much to their studio versions but the band still managed to be magnetic on stage through the entirety of their hour on stage.

I’m not really sure what I was expecting. I’d heard great things about The XX live but also some more negative thoughts on what the band brings to the stage. First up, I thought their lighting was perfect; it totally fit the vibe of the music and it added to the mood in the Commodore. Too often lighting is either dull or distracting. Not last night.

Of course it was the music that mattered and it was nearly note perfect all night. The XX create a nocturnal atmosphere on their debut record and they brought every song from that album to life the same way on stage. Once the final notes of Intro faded away the crowd was already clawing for the next song that turned out to be Crystalised which was greeted with a roar. In fact, every song was. All night. Not bad for a band with only eleven original songs to their name.

In addition to every song from the record the band also chucked in their Kyla cover, Do You Mind? (which stomps all over the original) to fill out their set. But it was songs like Islands and Heart Skipped A Beat, songs I’ve been practically living with for the better part of a year now, that were so amazing to finally hear live. Romy Madley Croft’s guitar tones were brilliant and bassist Oliver Sim was a surprisingly deft player as well. But it was Jamie Smith on the touchpads and synths that really impressed me. I was expecting a programmed drum machine all night and instead Smith was playing beats with his hands while handling other synth duties as well. Impressive.

But the pinnacle of the gig had to be the performance of Infinity which more or less closed the main set. This was one example of The XX taking a song and giving it a new life on stage. The band dragged out the finale as the tension built and built bringing the song to a dramatic end. But then they continued with an extended, aggressive instrumental piece which totally blew me away. A mighty impressive gig.

Setlist
Intro
Crystalised
Islands
Heart Skipped A Beat
Fantasy
Shelter
VCR
Do You Mind?
Basic Space
Night Time
Infinity > Instrumental outro
———
Stars

My photos are over at Flickr as usual.

Special mention must be made of last night’s opening act, JJ. For the record, I actually don’t mind some of the stuff from both their albums. A bit samey but there are a few pretty great songs there (like this one). However, I don’t get the hype created by Pitchfork last year. Nevertheless, JJ are out on the road, riding the final turns of that hype-wave on in to shore…where they are getting smashed into the beach.

JJ suck live.

There is no other way to put it. 90% of their set was Girl JJ singing over the top of their songs played from a laptop or something. Nothing else. It was karaoke. Sometimes Girl JJ was joined by Boy JJ who played some rather superflous acoustic guitar (also over the top of the prerecorded tracks). There were points in the set when I thought maybe it was a joke? But it wasn’t. The other 10% that didn’t totally suck was the opening two songs that Girl JJ played with just an acoustic guitar (nothing prerecorded) that she was actually playing. Her voice is kind of nice and ethereal…I could have gone for a more folky set like that. But no. JJ Karaoke it was.

They’re young and I guess they’re trying to quickly establish themselves while people are interested which is the only explanation for even bothering to go on tour when all you do is hit a button on a laptop and then sing. They need to get the hell off the road, devise some sort of live set and then try again. Never ever pay money to see this band. The most accurate description of JJ’s set last night came from professional blurb writer @jessgrey:

“She’s like an ewok pounding rum n cokes.”

Vancouver was spoiled for shows last night. Charlotte Gainsbourg kicked off her (debut?) North American tour at the Vogue, Beach House was at the Rickshaw and Passion Pit were at the Commodore. Meanwhile at the Orpheum, Micachu and the Shapes, Deerhunter and Spoon formed an impressive triple bill. I missed Micachu but I am a massive fan of both Spoon and Deerhunter so last night was pretty damn great. First up, the headliners Spoon.

I last caught Spoon at the 2008 Big Day Out in Sydney but it had been nearly five years since I last saw them headline their own show in which time the band have put out another couple albums. Add this to the previous three near flawless records and Spoon have amassed one of the most intimidatingly impressive back catalogues of any currently active band. This meant that every time Spoon started a song last night, a exclaimed “YES!” to myself. I mean just look at the setlist below.

The show actually started off a little slow with two of my least favourite songs from this year’s Transference, Before Destruction and Nobody Gets Me But You. Not that they’re bad songs mind you, just not up to the level of most of Spoon’s other material. But once the piano chords from The Way We Get By filled the Orpheum the show never looked back. Every song played was followed by another song I really wanted to hear and you can’t ask for more from a concert than that.

The best part is that Spoon fill their sets with album tracks you might expect them to have left behind by now and some of these songs were my favourite moments last night. Someone Something from Kill The Moonlight for example. But perhaps the best was a pair of songs from Girls Can Tell: Everything Hits At Once and Anything You Want, the latter of which Britt Daniel said had not been played in a very long time.

Even the moody and somewhat tuneless The Ghost Of You Lingers comes across amazing live. While Spoon typically write fairly conventional songs, songs like The Ghost Of You Lingers and Before Destruction illustrate that Spoon may actually be a really weird band who somehow manage to channel their inner pop song writer better than most.

I’ve always found Spoon to be a precise band: nothing is out of place and there is nothing unnecessary in their songs, be it an overdubbed guitar, superfluous backing vocals or a distracting melody. On stage they are more or less the same and I’m always impressed with Britt’s sharp guitar tones and Jim Eno’s stellar work on the drums. By the time the band played their closing trio of I Turn My Camera On, Don’t You Evah, and Jonathon Fisk I was completely enthalled with this band’s ability to simply never be anything less than damn near perfect.

Setlist
Before Destruction
Nobody Gets Me But You
The Way We Get By
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
Small Stakes
The Ghost Of You Lingers
Someone Something
Rhthm & Soul
Everything Hits At Once
Is Love Forever?
Written In Reverse
Love Song (The Damned cover)
Anything You Want
Who Makes Your Money
The Beast And Dragon, Adored
I Summon You
Don’t Make Me A Target
The Underdog
Got Nuffin
———
I Saw The Light
I Turn My Camera On
Don’t You Evah
Jonathon Fisk

Deerhunter have been one of my favourite bands over the past few years. I caught them live a couple times in Sydney last year and loved every minute of both of their shows so I was as excited for Bradford and the boys as I was for Spoon. I was expecting a fairly short opening set but the band played for about 50 minutes and focused most of their set on their more strightforward song-based material so the set actually felt a lot longer. By the time the band left the stage they had a big crowd of people dancing in front of the stage (in a seated theatre, mind you) which is always a great sign for a support act. But then again, Deerhunter aren’t your typical support act.

First up, new songs! The band played four new songs last night which will hopefully see the light of day in the not too distant future (Bradford hinted their might be a new Deerhunter record soon during last night’s set), three of which you can see here on Pitchfork. The Lockett Pundt sung Fountain Stairs, Primitive 3-D and Revival are all concise songs in line with most of the material from Microcastle, albeit more aggressive and uptempo. The fourth new one, Helicopter, was a bit different. It featured a slow, heavy beat from drummer Moses Archuleta and is, according the the engimatic Bradford Cox, a story about a porn star dropped from a helicopter in the Black Forest. Or something to that effect. It was quite different from the other new ones and wouldn’t really fit on Deerhunter’s last record or Weird Era Cont. Anyway, all four new songs bode well for the next Deerhunter record.

The new material was accompanied by a couple of songs from Crytograms, including the title track as the set closer. It featured Spoon’s Britt Daniel on guitar and Eric Harvey on keyboards which was kinda cool…but the song itself was not nearly as fierce as I’ve seen it played in the past. Check a video of it here (pardon the sound, the iPhone has the worst mic I’ve ever heard). The rest of the set was a mix of songs from Microcastle, one from Weird Era, and a couple from the Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP. Vox Celeste, one of my favourite Deerhunter songs, was particularly awesome.

Special mention must also be made of Nothing Ever Happened. As the band played the song Bradford jumped down to play the song around the front row and he was quickly surrounded by dozens of dancing Deerhunter fans. The song, which is usually extended in its live incarnation, was then played for about ten minutes. It was nuts. By the time the band hit the song’s final movement there was a huge surge of euphoria and when the song ended I think Deerhunter had converted a lot of new fans in the crowd.

It was a great opening set and it left me wanting more. Hurry back, Deerhunter.

Setlist
Hazel St.
Fountain Stairs (new)
Never Stops
Little Kids
Primitive 3-D (new)
Revival (new)
Disappearing Ink (with Spoon’s Rob Pope)
Nothing Ever Happened
Helicopter (new)
Famous Last Words
Vox Celeste
Cover Me (Slowly)
Agoraphobia
Cryptograms (with Spoon’s Britt and Eric)

A few photos from the gig are here. And if any of you read this far and were at the Charlotte Gainsbourg show last night, how was it?

After Tuesday night’s Jonsi gig, Amanda and I trekked through the set of Fringe to check out Sydney’s Dead Letter Chorus. It was so great to see a pretty small Australian act playing a full room here in Vancouver (on a school night, no less). I had a quick chat with Cam and Gabby before the show and they seemed to have really enjoyed their time in Canada. Unfortunately we had to leave before the set finished but not before I was impressed with how far they’ve come as a band.

It had been a few years since I last saw them back in Australia and in that time they’ve really, really dialed in their live show. A brand new song sung by Gabby early in the set was particularly memorable (hope to hear it again on the next record). The Peaceful Sleep Of Death and Down In Your Valley, two of my favourites from The August Magnificent, were also great; the former was just huge.

Midway through their set, local boy Dan Mangan joined them on stage. When Dan recently toured Australia Dead Letter Chorus served as his backing band so this wasn’t an impromptu jam session but a tight performance of some of Dan’s best songs, including Road Regrets.

I think it was a pretty memorable final gig in Canada for Dead Letter Chorus. I hope they’ve enjoyed their stay. Now can we get The Drones, Dappled Cities, The Basics, Snowman, Baseball and The Grates up here please?

Download
Dead Letter Chorus – Down In Your Valley
Dan Mangan – Robots
Dan Mangan – Road Regrets

Godspeed You! Black Emperor are back. Not much to add to the above except some squeals of excitement and hope. Hope for some shows near Vancouver (though I’m betting the west coast will miss out on GY!BE, again) and even fainter hope for a new record or EP.

Download
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Albanian (live)

Last night Jónsi, lead singer of Sigur Ros, kicked off his debut solo tour at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on the same day his debut solo record, Go, was released. The stars were seemingly aligned for a pretty amazing spectacle and that is exactly what burst from the elaborately adorned stage.

The show ranged from Jónsi’s (more or less) solo opening number on acoustic guitar through the finale of Grow Till Tall which extends its studio counterpart into a massive, Sigur Ros-like epic that was, without a doubt, the perfect ending to what was a memorable gig. And everything in between? Just as spectacular.

Every song from Go was played but what really pleasantly surprised me was the number of new/unreleased songs Jónsi performed (six in total). I’m not sure if there is an EP in the works or another album but I was blown away by the quality of these new songs. The one titled on the setlist as New Piano Song ended up being one of my favourite songs on the night. It featured Jónsi playing piano and drummer þorvaldur þorvaldsson on a secondary drum kit that seemed to consist of pots and pans.

The show started off pretty slowly as Jónsi has clearly constructed his set to build up from quieter, slower songs (Hengilás, for example) to the more rambunctious and playful songs that featured heavily later on (Go Do, Boy Lilikoi, Animal Arithmetic). In fact, I’d be surprised if the setlist changed much at all over the course of the tour; great care was taken to bring each song to life not only musically but also on the multiple screens and props that made the stage reminiscent of play about the triumphant spirit of nature. Or something.

Like some Sigur Ros visuals, many of the projections (of wolves, owls, rain, moons, trees blowing in the wind) were synced beautifully with the music and, in some instances, brought deeper meaning to the lyrics. One curtain dropped early in the set revealing a massive constructed background that resembled broken windows being overtaken by trees while behind that another screen continued to feature animations. All in all it was very impressive. And there were costumes!

But ultimately we were there for the music and it did not disappoint either. As I mentioned above, Grow Till Tall was quite different from its studio version and a number of the other songs from the record were also a bit more lively on stage. This was no doubt aided by some pretty insane drumming and Jónsi’s always breathtaking voice which is something best experienced in a big room with wonderful acoustics.

And while I was impressed by Jónsi’s vocal performances on some of the slower pieces and impressed by the generous inclusion of six new songs and impressed by the musicianship and impressed by the stage setup, lights and visuals, it was probably the joyful renditions of Go Do, Boy Lilikoi, and Animal Arithmetic that truly blew me away. Three of the finest pop songs of the year all on one record and even better live. Just an unbelievable show.

Setlist
Stars In Still Water
Hengilás
Icicle Sleeves
Kolniður
Tornado
Saint Naive
Sinking Friendships
Go Do
Boy Lilikoi
K12
New piano song
Around Us
———
Jonsi new guitar song
Animal Arithmetic
Grow Till Tall

I’ve put some photos up on Flickr. And if you don’t believe me that the show was amazing, The Georgia Straight, Spin, The Backstage Rider, and Guttersnipe were also pretty impressed. There’s also a helpful collection of photos and reviews on Jonsi’s site.