I’ve heard the Name Game play out in many contexts, but at a concert—between the drummer and some guy standing ten rows into the audience—was a new one. “Do you know Rebecca Callahan*?” shouted a tall kid in a white Polo. “She was, like, two grades ahead…”

“Rebecca, oh, yeah,” replied Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman.

This, one supposes, is the fate of stage banter at a show when the drummer admits he grew up in a nearby suburb (Rockville) and is pressed upon to kill time between every song while the lead singer re-tunes his 12-string guitar and the rest of the band hangs out in unhelpful silence. But that was the sort of casual vibe Fleet Foxes brought to the 9:30 Club on Wednesday, breaking down the distance between the band and the sold-out audience in such a way that it felt less like a crowded concert hall than the living room of a buddy who makes you pay $9 for a Guinness. Other topics of band-audience banter included the menu at Rockville pastry shop The Fractured Prune, frontman Robin Pecknold’s bad haircut (hidden beneath a red knit hat, which he refused to remove), and whether Tillman more closely resembled Jesus Christ, Charles Manson, or Rob Zombie.

Read More “9:30 Two-fer: Fleet Foxes and M. Ward” »

Fleet Foxes have sold out two shows at the 9:30 Club tomorrow night. If you’re one of the folks with tickets, a word of advice: show up early to see Espers, who will be opening both shows. Espers are a Philadelphia-based band playing folk music with a heavy dose of psychedelic rock influence. Acid-drenched electric guitar and gorgeous vocal harmonies are their tools of the trade. Fronted by Meg Baird (who had a recent solo album out on Drag City, Dear Companion) and Greg Weeks (who – obscure trivia time! – once ran a prog-rock mail-order operation called New Sonic Architecture), this sextet takes beautiful but brooding folk songs and turns them into dark, intense journeys into the night.

Listing bands like Fairport Convention, Pentangle and Incredible String Band as influences, Espers are a solid pairing with Fleet Foxes. Their music is weightier and darker, but equally inspiring in its ethereal beauty. They’ve been largely inactive since their 2006 sophomore album II, so this is the first chance in a long time that anyone has gotten to see them. If you don’t have a ticket to either of these shows, Espers will also be appearing at Sonar in Baltimore, supporting Kurt Vile, on August 11.

Photo courtesy of Espers’ Myspace page

Julian Plenti: “Only If You Run”
It’s not much of a surprise that Julian Plenti, the solo project of Interpol’s Paul Banks, sounds a lot like Interpol. “Only if You Run” has the same clean and spacey guitars, the same reverb drenched outro-vocals, and the same sounds-cool-enough gobbledygook lyrics that Banks’ other band has been working for ten years now. Banks makes a few welcome tweaks, though, adding drum machines and some abstract noises. And hey, Interpol’s mildly-irritating bass player–who wears a gun holster and looks kind of like Shamu–isn’t on here, so that’s something, too.

Mission of Burma: “1,2,3, Partyy”
At this point the Mission of Burma reunion has gone on longer (by about three years) and been more productive than the band’s original run during the early ’80s. And it’s just going to keep going, apparently. “1,2,3, Partyy,” from the group’s upcoming third post-reunion record The Sound, The Speed, The Light, is just as sloppy, thrashy, and powerful as ever.

Ducktails: “Parasailing”
Thirty years ago, if you wanted to have somebody massage your third eye with new-age synthesizer music, you had to either buy a record or go sit down in somebody’s spaceship-esque basement studio. The necessary gear–hulking keyboards, oscillators, and filters–wasn’t exactly travel-size. But New Jersey’s Ducktails–with his more manageable network of footpedals and tiny synthesizers– can, if so inclined, bring the meditative all-night-flight to your town.

Robin Pecknold: “Two Headed Boy” (Neutral Milk Hotel Cover)
Fleet Foxes singer/heartthrob Robin Pecknold recently performed this song–originally by Neutral Milk Hotel–at a benefit for Seattle’s Vera Project, and it’s likely that the bootleg recording has already caused a few fatal music-blogger brain-aneurysms. But at least they aren’t excited over nothing. Pecknold comfortably slots his silky voice into the song’s surreal sensibilities and really kills it. Well, he kills it for a while, at least. Then he starts to forget the words.

Grizzly Bear has caught some flack on this blog, but the jury was still out for me going into last night’s show. I bought Yellow House a few weeks ago, and while I had listened to it through a few times and found it intriguing (if not exactly catchy), I was not convinced enough to drop $9.99 on Veckatimest (or the other one, or the EP). It wasn’t that Grizzly Bear’s brand of wafting psychedelia turned me off; it was that after each listen I came away having absorbed nothing–not a single lyric, theme, or idea. I would listen again, straining to concentrate on the music, finding this impossible. For all its entrancing dynamics, the music just didn’t have any handholds. I wanted to ride along, but it kept slipping away.

Read More “Sound Walls: Grizzly Bear & Here We Go Magic at 9:30″ »

Fleet Foxes, they of the empyreal harmonies, are in high demand these days. The band’s self-titled debut LP, released a year ago, quickly earned a spot on the contemporary folk syllabus. Frontman Robin Pecknold, a social recluse whose lyrical incantations seem to echo along the slopes of some far-off mountain range, has managed to hook into a sound that Brian Wilson might have discovered if Brian Wilson were a hermitic goatherd. Actually, Pecknold comes from the wealthy Seattle suburb of Kirkland–but he’s spent plenty of time in the mountains, and used to be way into Lord of the Rings. His songs bear a sort of mythical seal, dealing with wanderers and wildernesses and grounded by an extraordinary reverence for kinship.

Lucky us: The capital has been selected as one of the 10 cities in North America Fleet Foxes will hit on their summer tour, Sub Pop announced yesterday. They’ll be playing at the 9:30 Club on Wednesday, July 29. Tickets for the show go on pre-sale at 10 a.m. tomorrow. In advance of the tour, the label today released the song “Mykonos,” off the band’s 2008 EP Sun Giant, as a single. It is a gorgeous song, all long shadows and ghostly harmonies singing of solitude and struggle. Pecknold’s brother Sean, whom the song is rumored to have been written for, directed the exceptionally groovy music video.

FLEET FOXES NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES, SUMMER 2009:

Read More “Fleet Foxes: D.C. Makes Summer Tour Cut” »

Below: this year’s top-sellers at Melody Records. Glad to see Gnarls on there; chagrined to see Coldplay; not surprised to see either; curious whether any other stores were able to move the Hancock album like this.

1. Madonna, Hard Candy
2. Coldplay, Viva la Vida
3. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One
4. Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend
5. Portishead, Third
6. Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Hudson
7. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
8. R.E.M., Accelerate
9. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
10. Gnarls Barkley, The Odd Couple
11. Sigur Ros, Med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaust
12. The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely
13. TV on the Radio: Dear Science
14. Herbie Hancock, River: The Joni Letters
15. Duffy, Rockferry