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.

Year of the Tiger visits TJN

Last week This Joyful Noise had its first on air guest, the fabulous bassist and singer and composer Emma Alabaster. We talked for the better part of the hour, and to anyone who missed it (is that everyone? that’s everyone, right?), I will try my best to get a copy. They’re telling me that won’t happen, but asking a few more times can’t hurt.

This week, I am proud to announce, we will be hearing the music of Year of the Tiger. Henry Ivry and Sable Young will be visiting the studio, where we will again test whether years of listening to Terry Gross actually qualifies someone to conduct a radio interview.

Here’s hoping. Nothing fell apart last time, unless you count that moment I left the mics on and wondered out loud why we didn’t hear the music (hint: it was because I left the mics on), which we just won’t.

Listen up, tomorrow (Monday) from two to three, WHCR 90.3 FM New York, and streaming live.

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.