Of Monsters And Men, The Tabernacle, Atlanta, Nov. 29, 2012

Icelandic folk-pop band Of Monsters And Men played last evening at The Tabernacle in Atlanta.  Even though I had tickets, I almost didn't go, forcing me to consider my ambivalent attitudes toward music, popularity, and success.

Please let me explain.  I first heard the band Of Monsters And Men in October 2011, when KEXP Seattle covered the Icelandic Airwaves festival in Reykjavik and posted several videos of emerging Icelandic bands.  Iceland has a surprisingly vibrant and diverse music scene, that goes well beyond Bjork - in fact, the current scene there has absolutely nothing to do with Bjork at all.  I enjoyed a lot of what I heard coming from the small island nation, and my mind was truly blown to learn that even Greenland now has its own music scene.

I think I fell in love with Greenland's charming Nive Nielsen during her giggle at the 2:41 mark.  But already I'm off track.  See how easily I go off track?  All it takes in an Inuk giggle.

During this discovery of Icelandic and Greenlandic bands, one group clearly stood out from the rest due to their songwriting and sound, their harmonies, and their professionalism.  It was clear to me then that Of Monsters And Men could  make it big in the U.S. someday, and share billings with bands like Blind Pilot, The Head And The Heart, and Milo Greene.  I could even imagine them opening for Arcade Fire.  I looked forward to seeing them tour the States some day, and thought there were big things in store for this little band.

It turns out that I was more right than I knew.  The band did come to the U.S. early this year,  where they played on the spring festival circuit (Coachella, SXSW, Sasquatch, etc.) to rave reviews.  Videos got posted, music blogs praised their sound, and they rode the inexplicable Mumford and Sons wave to great popularity.  When their album My Head Is An Animal was released in April 2012, it shot up to the Number 6 spot on the Billboard Charts, and the Edward Sharpe-like single Little Talks reached Number One on the Alternative Music Chart.

But it seems we indie music lovers have a complex relationship with success.  The more other people start to listen to our favorite bands, the more suspicious we become of those bands.  Part of the snob appeal of listening to these emerging artists is hearing their brilliance before the rest of the world and enjoying our little secrets, but once a song reaches Number One and is used for automobile commercials, soundtracks to Katherine Heigl films, and karaoke, we tend to deny we ever liked it that much in the first place.

One way to avoid this hypocricy is to claim you don't like anything at all and to criticize everything, as is done  by cynical anonymous commenters on many a music blog.  But that strikes me as a particularly joyless solution to this dilemma.

Hipster snobbishness aside, my major complaint with new-found popularity is the crowds.  Instead of playing a little club like The Earl to an over-21 audience, or even a relatively intimate all-ages show at the Variety Playhous, Of Monsters And Men's first appearance in Atlanta was to a capacity crowd of high-schoolers at the cavernous Tabernacle.  I would much rather see a band up close and personal at some little club than from a distance while in the middle of a crowd of teenagers.  

Was it even worth going?, I wondered last evening.  I had become sick and tired of hearing that "Hey!" from Little Talks a long time ago, that shout that they co-opted from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and which The Lumineers subsequently bludgeoned to death with their hit song "Hey, Ho."  I was watching the time slip away last night, but just before the clock passed the point where it would no longer be worthwhile even trying to go, I rallied my enthusiasm and jumped in the car.

Only to run smack into the NFL traffic of a Thursday night Falcons-Saints game.  I had forgotten that the game was last night, and as The Tabernacle isn't far at all from the Georgia Dome, I suddenly found myself in the middle of gridlocked traffic, with the police trying to direct the flow of cars, including mine, to stadium parking lots.  Streets I wanted to take were closed, two-way streets were temporarily one-way (in the opposite direction of where I wanted to head), and for a while there it looked like I wasn't going to make it to The Tabernacle after all.

Nothing makes me more determined to do something than being told that I can't.  Now, I decided when my  car hadn't advanced more that two car-lengths in the past five minutes, I'm determined to stand in the middle of a bunch of teenagers and listen to some Icelandics with guitars shout "Hey!" at me. I peeled out of the line of traffic by doing a U-turn in the middle of Marietta Street, found my way over to Tech Parkway, and eventually down to Centennial Park and then over to The Tabernacle, with time still left before the show.  There were crowds of tailgaters in all of the parking lots, and I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have found a solitary available spot in my usual lot right next to The Tabernacle (although at an exorbitant, "Special Event" rate).  I got inside The Tabernacle and waded into the sea of teenagers on the floor just as the show was scheduled to start.

The scheduled opener was Elle King, who for some reason wasn't able to make it to the show (traffic?).  But rather than start with the next act, Iceland's Sóley Stefánsdóttir, a member of the indie collective Seabear and another one of those Icelandic Airwaves discoveries, we were allowed to stand around and wait 40 minutes, the approximate length of a warm-up act, before Sóley finally took the stage. I spent the time watching the score of the Falcon's game on my Droid and wondering if I shouldn't just head back home and cut my losses.

I liked Sóley's set and she has an appealing stage presence, but her intricate and intimate music isn't really suited to large venues and the crowd of teenagers was there to hear Of Monsters And Men perform songs from My Head Is An Animal, not to hear someone named Sóley.  Much talking and socializing during her set by the audience distracted one from more fully appreciating her set, which included her song I'll Drown.  I think she's a performer who would absolutely captivate a Terminal West crowd, but unfortunately not that crowd at that place at that time.

Of Monsters And Men took that stage at 9:45 and played a really terrific set for the next hour, followed by a two-song encore. For those of you who somehow have escaped them to date, the band is fronted by two singers,the adorable Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and the rotund Ragnar "Raggi" Þórhallsson.

As oddly matched as they may appear, their voices harmonize perfectly, and their warm harmonies account for much of the appeal of listening to Of Monsters And Men.  Their singing and playing are supported by guitarist Brynjar Leifsson, whose Nordic look alone would probably have made him a rock star regardless of OMAM.

The rhythm section consists of bow-tied bassist Kristján Páll Kristjánsson and drummer/cheerleader Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson.   

Finally, the sound is rounded out with a pair of multi-instrumentalists, namely keyboardist/accordion player Árni Guðjónsson and keyboardist/accordion player/trumpeter Ragnhildur Gunnarsdóttir.

As the band played, whatever snobbish disdain I had for their success quickly melted away and I found myself really enjoying their set.  They have everything that I like in this genre of music.  Good harmonies?  Check.  Interesting instrumentation? Check.  Performers who occasionally switch roles and instruments? Check.  A floor tom on which performers can occasionally bang away? Check.  They've got it all.

It was inevitable that one of these large, folk-rock collectives was going to eventually make it big.  The genre is growing and  seems surprisingly popular with teens and young adults.  I've rarely seen more affection from an audience for a band than I have at some of these shows, particularly for The Head And The Heart and for Blind Pilot, and if any of these bands were finally going to make it big, it might as well be those sincere young men and women from Iceland.

While I found some of their audience participation a little forced - it seems like every song in the first half of their set required us to clap, sing a particular passage, wave our arms, or do something - they settled down in the second half, letting the music speak for itself and allowing the audience to participate in its own manner.  By the time they got to their hit Little Talks toward the end of the set, the whole audience sang along to every word, Head-And-The-Heart-style.
   

Their set even included a cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' moody Skeletons.

During their encore, Brynjar Leifsson played some sort of guitar made from an old gas can, Nanna and Raggi harmonized as beautifully as ever, and Nanna even took a turn wailing away on the floor tom for a while.

I left the show with a big smile on my face and beat the traffic home before the football game got out.  By the way, the Falcons won the game 23-13, improving their record to 11-1.

The lesson in all of this is not to begrudge the success of others.

Local Natives

Last week, sometime between Paris and London, Local Natives found the time to shoot the first video for their forthcoming album, Hummingbirds, and, um, here it is.

Om, Daniel Higgs at 529, Atlanta

On Monday night, the 26th of November, the band Om played at the 529 club in Atlanta, Georgia.  Daniel Higgs opened.  The warm-up act was Atlanta band High Bias, but unfortunately I arrived too late to catch them, which is really saying something given the late hours of the 529.  I usually don't go out to hear music on Mondays due to my obligations to Monday Night Zazen, but when the truly worthwhile band comes through, like YACHT for example, one just has to make exceptions. The price one pays, however, is a late arrival and the probability of missing the warm-up act.

How can one describe a Daniel Higgs performance?  I thought a solo acoustic musician was an odd choice for a drone-metal band like Om; actually I still do, even though it clearly worked.  Higgs, probably best known as the singer for Lungfish, played alone, accompanied only by his banjo, on which he played hypnotic arabesque runs and almost flamenco-like passages, while occasionally singing what sounded like improvised lines ("I work on the Sabbath every day of the week").  The spell-bound crowd, and it was probably the most crowded I've seen 529, was hear-a-pin-drop quiet as Higgs descended further and further down a rabbit hole of his own imagination.  The applause on the rare occasions that Higgs paused to calibrate his trajectory was warm and sincere.

Om's set was plagued by some manner of technical problems that I didn't quite understand, but it took them a long time and many stage visits by their roadies to get started, and even then microphones dropped out during vocal performances and the band seemed pretty ticked off at times.  Not that it got in the way of an excellent performance, however.  

Om recently expanded from a duo to a trio, and in concert it's hard to imagine how they could ever have been anything but the lineup on the stage.   Their music is every bit as hypnotic as Higgs', although they employ different techniques to achieve that state.  Their usual method of attack was to layer Eastern-sounding synth lines and samples over a throbbing, fuzzed-out bass pattern, and then pin the listener to the floor with an unexpected drum attack.  But they had many variations on this theme, which kept the whole show very interesting.

Photography was near impossible during the show for several reasons, chief among them being the fact that I forget my camera, without which it's hard to take anything more than a mental impression.  But I did have the camera app in my little Droid, but the next challenges was the crowd of tall young men pressed toward the front of the stage, between and above whom one had to jockey for position in order to take any kind of picture.  Then there were several "Absolutely No Flash Photography" signs taped to the walls around the stage, further limiting one's options.  So crappy as these pictures are, it's actually amazing that I got anything at all.

The exceptionally attentive and quiet audience remained exceptionally attentive and quiet during Om's set.  During one long drone composition at the end of the set, as keyboardist and effects man Emil Amos was wailing some sort of Arabic-sounding chant, several people toward the rear of the club began hooting and hollering along, until someone near the front of the club turned around and shouted "Shut up!"  Surprisingly and  somewhat uncharacteristically, they did.

One other note:  it must be mentioned at some point that the side wall in the tiny performance space at 529 had apparently been demolished, and the club has expanded to two or even three times its former size, which was tiny so even with the wall gone it's still a small club.  But this expansion would still be a major improvement, and if they reconfigure the stage so that more than five people can stand abreast in front it, it will be a much needed and much appreciated improvement of a club that increasingly is getting some of the best bookings in town, even giving the nearby and redoubtable Earl a run for its money.

Happy 70th Birthday, Jimi Hendrix

Today would have been Jimi Hendrix 70th birthday, if not for the CIA-sponsored  assassination back in 1970 (no, I'm just kidding, he died of drug-related asphyxia over in London - there was no disappearance by any government).

His recording career, which only produced four albums during his lifetime, was too short by far.  In  tribute to one of the 20th Century's most singular musicians, I offer this performance clip from 1970.  Sorry about the abrupt ending (not my editing).

Crayon Fields

Lo-fi Australian pop band The Crayon Fields (Mirror Ball) have a new song out, the summery sounding So Do I (remember, it's the start of summer now Down Under).

The Crayon Fields play intricate, atmospheric pop music recalling the minor key majesty and close-knit harmonies of 60s maestros the Zombies, the Byrds, and the Beach Boys. After forming in the last year of high school in 2002 and releasing two independent EPs, their unruffled, dreamy debut Animal Bells was released in 2006, followed by 2009's All the Pleasures of the World.  They've reportedly been working on their new album for the past year and So Do I is being debuted as a part of a 20-song compilation (20 Big Ones) by their label, Chapter Music.

No word yet on any tour plans.

Poor Moon

Out with the old and in with the new: modern music continues to advance, and surprisingly (or not) often winds up back at its roots again.  Here's a video from an October 18 set at New York's 2012 CMJ festival by the Seattle band Poor Moon, a side project of members of Fleet Foxes, that builds on the vocal tradition of past generation bands like the Beach Boys and the Moody Blues.

The Poor Moon tour brought them to Atlanta on October 25, where they played  a warm and wonderful late-night set at 529.  Photos of that show, below.

Poor Moon's music is defined by their sense of harmony and inventive instrumentation.  To give you more of an idea of that sound, here's a video of Poor Moon that I found on the band's Facebook page performing their song Bucky Pony at Vancouver's Media Club back on September 22.