Morning, folks!

The mysterious purveyor of the Felice Brothers golden-ticket essay contest named a winner Friday. I’ll share the winning essay here later today, but here’s a taste of the author’s pathos at work:

I don't know how I missed out. But don't make me sit at home alone on Friday night, listening to Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1, masturbating in the dark, and waiting for the tears to come.

As it turned out there were no real winners at the sold-out show at the Rock & Roll Hotel that night. The gig started out promising before someone in the front row teased the musicians that their beloved Yankees were about to be eliminated from the playoffs. The rest of the concert had a spiteful air; the band, visibly pissed, played a lot of uncharismatic new material and never got in sync with the audience. Kudos to the Felice Brothers for being unafraid of veering from their gothic folk-rock wheel house, but this was clearly not their night.

Comedian Louis C.K., by contrast, managed to give a packed Warner Theater an hour and sixteen minutes of new material without losing anyone for a second.

Anyway:

The discordant guitaring of D.C.’s ‘90s hardcore punk scene is apparently not the District’s only six-string legacy; turns out the DMV is also something of a classical-guitar mecca, reports WaPo. Writer Anne Midgette traces the lineage back to Greek immigrant Sophocles Papas, who built the scene back in the ‘20s. Tally another point for the Greeks in the canon of D.C. music—you’ll recall it was another Greek, John “Johnny Boy” Katsouros, who launched erstwhile Washington R&B legend Terry Huff back in the early ‘60s.

Arena Stage opened in its new home. It tweeted all the relevant coverage.

Finally, New York magazine has an article about the death of early 21-century hipsterism—a condensed version of an investigation by the literary journal n+1. The music piece figures most prominently in what the author calls the “Hipster Primitive moment,” when we all grew beards, donned flannel, and pretended the Industrial Revolution never happened. From the article:

Music led the artistry of this phase... Here are the names of some significant bands, post-2004: Grizzly Bear, Neon Indian, Deerhunter, Fleet Foxes, Department of Eagles, Wolf Parade, Band of Horses, and, most centrally, Animal Collective. (On the electronic-primitive side, LCD Soundsystem.) Listeners heard animal sounds and lovely Beach Boys–style harmonies; lyrics and videos pointed to rural redoubts, on wild beaches and in forests; life transpired in some more loving, spacious, and manageable future, possibly of a Day-Glo or hallucinatory brightness.

The n+1 book version, by the way, has contributions by City Paper columnist Moe Tkacik, who, speaking at a Symposium, blamed neo-hipsterism on the era’s big movers: the Internet—for breaking down the barriers to subculture—and China, for enabling the sort of credit flow that would let American Apparel open 200 stores in two years. (She does not venture to explain where the Hipster-primitive animal fetish came from.)

Me? I blame the Internet for how little I am being paid to write this.

Bye!

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.

So as far as I was concerned, Grizzly Bear was on trial last night. The courtroom: The 9:30 Club, packed thick with an audience of breezy post-adolescents reveling in June's redefinition of Monday night.

Things did not start auspiciously. The opener, Here We Go Magic, confirmed my fears about how hypnotic, post-structural indie rock would play live to a hall full of people who seemed high on little but a glass and a half of Old Rasputin. With each song, Here We Go Magic appeared to follow the same protocol: Build a wall of sound, then drag it an arbitrary distance. Hearing these songs unfold was kind of like watching a wave gather itself without ever breaking. The full set, accordingly, felt like staring at the ocean.

Grizzly Bear came out strong, bathed in blue and violet stage lights. If Here We Go Magic was like watching the ocean, Grizzly Bear was like watching the ocean during a storm: bigger swells, more variegated, more dramatic, occasionally peaking with piercing guitar trills. The most impressive aspect of their sound by far was the vocal, which featured (primarily) three voices with three distinct timbres: Daniel Rossen's wood-solid tenor, Christopher Bear's quavering one, and Chris Taylor's soaring falsetto–the latter two benefiting from some serious reverb on the mic. Grizzly Bear definitely shares some alleles with Fleet Foxes in the post-Beach Boys lineage. But where Fleet Foxes's songs are grounded in folk music's inherent respect for structure, Grizzly Bear seems tethered by nothing at all.

Which, when you're trying to hold someone's attention for an hour and a half, is like fishing without a hook. Sure enough, after about 35 minutes I found myself glancing compulsively at my cell phone. Even in a storm, you can't stare at the ocean for too long without growing weary of its motion.

Health: "Die Slow"

Los Angeles noise-punks Health, whose debut LP sounded sort of like a vocoder getting tossed down a particularly ragged set of stairs, get a little more overtly tuneful on this new single. In fact, "Die Slow", with its foreboding industrial synths, clubby rhythm, and uneasy vocals, probably could have sold a fair share of cassingles in '94. It's the best argument yet for MTV to bring Alternative Nation out of retirement.

Stuart Murdoch: "God Help the Girl"
Give Stuart Murdoch some credit for knowing what he does best: wistful, thoroughly orchestrated, twee-pop about young, hip, and lonely women. This song from the Belle & Sebastian songwriter's long-in-the-works musical, God Help the Girl, doesn't do much to upend that winning formula. The strings, the dashed hopes, and the necessary kitchen-sink-drama lyrics are all there, only now there's a real-life hipster-woman belting it out, instead of Murdoch.

Kid Cudi feat. Kanye West, Common, Lady Gaga: "I Poke Her Face"
Kid Cudi's latest leak finds him rapping alongside his majordomo, Kanye West, and, annoyingly, Lady Gaga, whose bratty scatting makes up a significant portion of the backing track. But rendered into a rhythm track, Gaga isn't half-bad, and she certainly can't bring down Cudi and Kanye's high-brow rhymes about "getting brain in the library."

Earlier this week, the upcoming Grizzly Bear album, Veckatimest, leaked. We gave our first-impressions of the album. While a colleague joked that the much-anticipated LP was all texture and scaffolding and no melody, we disagree! We love the album more and more with each listen no matter the bootleg's sound quality.

Yesterday, the band responded in a blog item about the leak:

"So yeah, we are kind of bummed this leaked so early. We know it’s not the 90’s anymore and times have changed, and we’re super grateful for all the support people have shown us on the blogs and internet, but we were kind of hoping it wouldn’t happen this soon.

Ultimately we feel like we put out a great album and hope people enjoy it, and we really hope people take the time to pre-order and support the good one-and-a-half years it took to write and record it.

I promise you the album art for both CD and vinyl is going to be gorgeous. And a bonus: all vinyl people will get a high quality download coupon with their purchase.

Leaking is a tricky subject; as we all know, I’ve had my run ins with the law O__o (Hi, Mr. Sheriff!) I have conflicting opinions about it, as it’s really complicated, but ultimately it saddens me that a bummer-quality version of Veckatimest is going around. Please consider putting your energies into a pre-order or into waiting till May 26 for the album the way we intend it to be presented.

Not to get all mushy, but we definitely put a lot of love and work into this one and are just excited to hit the road and tour it again."

The band's singer/songwriter Ed Droste was more fun on Twitter.

Droste write on his twitter account:

"So yeah, it leaked. I'm happy people are loving it. Makes me smile! Just remember it's not a top notch sonic example. So keep that in mind."

In a later post, he teases with this: "You know what, screw it here's a quality version of the album! ENJOY!!!" He then provides a link to the Insound vinyl pre-order. Ha.

Of course, Droste tries a jokey sales pitch in another post: "Going to EXTRA dazzle up album both CD/Vinyl art to make up for this early leak!!!"

Veckatimest comes out May 26.

The new Grizzly Bear album, Veckatimest, leaked last night. Unexpected, sure. First link was a prank. By then, the real thing had already hit the message boards. It was Grizzly Bear's night. Even then people complained. Wha? Only 128 kbps? Indie Beggars are assholes. Showed me at least that Grizzly Bear knew about sound and marketing. People expect big things and big sounds from them; they don't want to listen to Orchestrated Pop with no 128 kbps. The band tweets and blogs. Every nerd had to file a blog post on the album art being released, the tracklist being finalized, the album going up for a vinyl pre-order on Insound. So when it leaked last night, I guess people wanted more, more, more.

But fuck it. Here's a first take at 128.

The album is way more aggressive than Yellow House. It's a glass house occasionally rattling with reverb-ed guitars (the band sounds like they invented reverb), the Beatles White Album, Nick Drake (his rhythms and orchestration only), and what you wished the Flaming Lips would sound like if they didn't love big beats and salad dressing commercials. The album is just dramatic enough. "Fine for Now" actually rocks. At the mid-point of "Southern Point," the drums go all in. "Two Weeks" is simple enough to memorize within three listens.  "Cheerleader" is the most haunted pop song you'll hear all year unless you listen to "Dory" first. "Ready, Able" then kinda tops it. And, well, "I Live With You" can be called beautiful.

Thank god for Twitter. How else would bloggers find out the name and production stage of Grizzly Bear's new album if Ed Droste wasn't tweeting away the details?

However, bloggers (like those over at Stereogum) are getting the specifics muddled. It's true, according to Droste's Twitter update 40 minutes ago, that the title of the new album is Veckatimest (Vecka-what?). But they're fucking up the track listing. OneThirtyBPM contacted the band and reported that:

The tracklisting is false. The release date will be May 26th. The rest of the information of the album will [be] revealed soon.

Pitchfork noted that the album "somehow involves recording with a children's choir, as well your favorite band's favorite neoclassical composer Nico Muhly and, possibly, forever-sleepy Beach House singer Victoria Legrand." These are the only e-leaked details.

Until the band demystifies the blogosphere, here are three unreleased tracks that are slated to make Veckatimest's final cut. Via KCRW, Letterman, and All Points West.