Jonsi at Terminal 5

Intimate live music sells itself, but why go to a big, impersonal concert? Any song you want is availably instantly, eternal, reproducible, and free or just about. Every large event is bootlegged an hour after it ends. Audiences, only partially present, thumb status updates or snap profile pictures or film for that night’s YouTube upload. No one dances.

Jonsi, performing solo after years with the oddball Icelandic pop outfit Sigur Ros, played Terminal 5 Sunday night, and the show he put on loudly defended ambitious live music. The big space with its three floors was filled with cinematic sound and soaring visuals. An elaborate stage, enormous video screens, and the expansive, ecstatic music itself earned its huge audience. The joy in those moments could not have been captured or reproduced.

Some of how Sigur Ros carry themselves – giving cryptic interviews, singing in a made-up language, and broadcasting a certain aloof self-regard – always turned me off. Indulgent and sometimes nearly ambient, their stuff can make for trying pop music, but it’s always great for studying or doing yoga. More importantly, repeat listens reveal great care and talent, and a sincerity so rare and precious you can’t help but be impressed. Listening to Staralfur, the 1999 track that made them famous, it’s hard to imagine modern music being any less cynical.

Jonsi now works closer to the surface, even singing in English, but he’s continued and actually amplified that childlike innocence. The pretty, looping melodies ride manic, joyous drums, rhythms that took center stage at the concert. Each surge of sound worked like a direct injection of endorphins. You feel this music square in your chest.

The video displays made the night, harmonizing with the band like another instrument. It snowed, thundered, poured rain and flooded on stage. Colors seeped and spread and exploded, images ran and tripped and fell apart. We were treated to virtuoso collages of animation, film, and effects, each as complex as the songs themselves. The panes of the backdrop managed to dance like a keyboard, tear like a canvas, and grow like a garden without ever moving an inch.

Music videos usually tell distracting stories, stage pyrotechnics, or show off a musician’s pretty face, completely missing the potential to compliment and expand the impact of music directly. Successful modern concerts, however, deliver carefully orchestrated, multi-sensory experiences. Done well, it’s very much worth the ticket.

“All 3000+ attendees were in the palms of his hands,” wrote The Music Slut after the show. “I’ve never witnessed a more respectful crowd at the massive Hell’s Kitchen space.” Powerful theatre will do that, focus thousands of eyes at once, and it’s a blessing to be a part of it. Leave your little screens at home, and remember: even if no one else is dancing, you can always be the first.

Jonsi’s new album, Go, is available (and streaming in full) here. He isn’t performing in the US any time soon, but watch his site for updates.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Tattle Tales

The Tattle Tales have been busy. They’ve got two shows coming up, May 7th and 14th, in Nyack. They’re releasing an EP (“Moon Glasses”) on the 14th. They’ll be visiting This Joyful Noise, and playing a live acoustic set, on May 24th. And then there’s this.

I thought the whole world slowed down for finals week, but apparently someone is still working hard. This is the tee shirt you will soon be able to purchase to proudly declare your allegiance to the Tales. Keep up with your favorite hardcore pop band with four vocalists, two guitars, a bass, drums and a keyboard at their myspace and tune in on the 24th at 2pm for The Tattle Tales unplugged.

School Rocks

Recently, school (in chic lowercase) played their first show, filling the living room of a gorgeous old house in Caroll Gardens. The band has been working hard to master songwriter Monroe Street’s exacting avant-garde pop compositions. Their efforts were well spent: school promises great things.

Tiny paper lanterns, strings of christmas lights, and an audience in plaids and prints established the cosy Brooklyn bona fides. Bard alumni reconnected, and the rest of us introduced ourselves, as a reggae LP spun in the corner. “The Joy of Pickling” watched from the bookshelf.

After a sheepish introduction from a man in a high white mask, we were off. Immediately Street’s guitar sounded like it was in several places at once. He wore it high against his chest, and bent his neck in concentration as he played, bobbing the mask up and down. Ringing and beautiful, the sound hopelessly overpowered vocals from Emma Grace Skove, who had the thankless task of finding a way to sway her hips to an ever shifting beat. She hung in gamely.

Emma Alabaster on bass and Zach Dunham on thrillingly spastic drums held together beautifully. Cracking, stuttering rhythms built to intricate epiphanies, the band cutting out and surging back in. The music school makes is difficult, no question. It’s full of dissonance and shifting tempos. When they come, though, the urgent, emotional climaxes feel as visceral as any blockbuster’s.

I’d love to hear cleaner studio versions of these songs, and those lyrics that got buried, but even raw, school delivered a lot of powerful sound. It’s music you can get lost in. They’re touring this summer, so keep an eye out. And bookmark their myspace, because they’re just about ungooglable.

Scrap Relation at The Stone

Some paintings are about the brushes and cloth, emotions and accidents that created them much more than the supposed subject. Scrap Relation makes music like that, about itself, about its own creation, its own beauty and dissonance: this humming, stuttering moment of live sound.

The Stone, a perfect dark corner of the Lower East Side, was filled tonight with a sea of seated bodes and the flash of the brass on the head of the upright bass. At times that bass and the drums melted into one instrument. The sax and guitar asked and answered each other’s questions. I tuned my attention from one instrument to the four voices splashing together in delicate conversation. Then to the room, the audience, and once, when a siren briefly joined the music, to the world outside. All the way back in then, the musicians’ faces, wild fingers flying.

I don’t know enough to place this complicated sound into a larger story about music, as I do, chapter and verse, genre and decade, with pop music. To call it timeless feels cheap, and not accurate, anyway. Instead, I will say that it hung in the present, in that blade of time where it was created. There, then, it filled the air around us, beautifully.