The Rake Magazine

Beck opened with "Loser." Talk about instantly winning over a crowd - a good portion of the audience mouthed along with the semi-non-sensical lyrics, and kept their lips moving Franny-like for the rest of the show. Mellow Gold came out fourteen years ago, and because this was an eighteen-plus show, this means some of the concertgoers were only four years old when it dropped. And they knew the words, too, which is kind of awesome.

In the last decade-and-a-half, Beck's released seven or eight major label albums, depending on whether you count Guerolito or not. His career has been in turns quiet and not-so-quiet, often depending on the status of his romantic relationships. Tonight he was loud, though, man.

There's a rumor going around that this might be his final tour, in which case the hit-heavy set list makes sense. Aside from Mutations, he played songs off every album, including "Where It's At," "Lost Cause," "Nicotine and Gravy," "Black Tambourine," and "Devil's Haircut." To hear these tracks grouped together was sort of ecstatically overwhelming. What's great is that Beck and his band - a drummer, a bassist, a really hot guitarist, and a strangely Garth-like keyboardist/sampler-ist - don't just play the songs as they sound on the CDs; every piece was tweaked a bit, not unrecognizably so, but enough to make it new and surprising.

Speaking of playing songs as they are on the albums, I can't help myself from mentioning and questioning the opening act, MGMT. They were cool, perhaps too cool, with those white-plastic-framed sunglasses and bad haircuts. But that's aight - I dig a little ‘tude from young musicians. Their set was solid, though unremarkable. If there was any problem it was the venue - Roy Wilkins has concrete floors and walls which I think are conducive to echoes, and so MGMT's already ambient sounds melted together maybe too much. I'm confused by their decision to play their hit song, "Kids," without instrumental back-up, instead opting for the recorded track. Band founders Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden ditched their guitar and keys, and met midstage to sing and do a mini-can-can. Still, it was the only part of their set where they showed any real emotion. It seems their performance is dictated by an inverse relationship - they can be exciting without instruments, or subdued with them.

Meanwhile, Beck's persona is certainly low-key, but - and maybe this is the wealth of fifteen years spent performing - he has charisma like a motherfucker. All he had to do was whisper ‘jump' and that weird girl in front of me with the short hair and her weird boyfriend with the long hair started going up and down. It was some serious Star Wars-type power. I wonder how long it's been since he's actually sympathized with losers.

Notes: Props to the crowd for using real cigarette lighters when Beck played his Sea Change stuff, instead of just holding open cell phones for their LED lights. Props to the tambourine guy on stage who at least tried to hit on the guitarist, and for wearing a ridiculous jumpsuit. Demerits for that one kid who tried to crowd surf. Props to the heavily pixilated movie screen behind the stage that now and then showed cool images of trees and leaves and Beck.

There's a certain tension in the Triple Rock. We're all sucking on secret mouthfuls of electricity, our synapses sputtering and sparking as we attempt to reckon with this music. It is a constant interplay of dissonance and beauty pulling at us and prickling our skin.

Emily Dantuma's operatic vocals curl like lurid smoke, escaping to the ceiling and hanging in a haunted fog. It is broken only by rabid, linear breakdowns administered by Company Inc.'s guitarist, Kenny Guenther. The St. Paul four-piece has the feel of Cleveland post punk icons, Pere Ubu, with its visceral panic and insanity squealing in the hollows between notes, the shock of time changes and its utter rawness. But Dantuma's baroque howling adds poignant luxury. The keyboards are also fitting in their simplicity, existing in stark contrast to the angular force of the guitar and bass. This is best shown in "No Time," as the keys add the backbone to Dantuma and Ollie Dodge's exchange of words. In the end, Company Inc. leaves the sparse crowd in a sunken-eyed daze after their whirlwind confusion and jaggedy elegance.

Next is Seattle's Dead Science. The trio somehow makes their 1940s vagabond look affect high-class dandyism. Singer and guitarist Sam Mickens is wearing a blood red shirt and heeled black boots, seductively leaning into his mic. It is as easy to imagine he is thrilling a speakeasy audience as entertaining these bony locals. Musically, Dead Science also touts old-world allure. Micken's soulful, out-of-control vibrato feels rare and steeped in melodrama. His vocals would be a fitting backtrack to mild violence or a tour through Nosferatu's lair. But, physically, he remains stagnant. He poses, lips quivering as if he is breathing life into funeral lilies, and shoots cold stares to the back of the room.

Jherek Bischoff's chainsaw-like approach to playing his stand-up bass adds a thick layer of tumult to this strange romance. Meanwhile, Nick Tamburro's spastic, heavy-handed drumming pushes Micken's staccato riffing toward unstitched chaos. Combined, the trio races through its complex song structures, enjoying abrupt stops and starts and unforeseen conclusions. The band is touring in promotion of its new album, Villainaire. It's a worthy purchase, managing to capture the band's hot and heavy live sound while showcasing even more stylistic flair.

High Places' poppy daydreams come as a pleasant change of pace. The Brooklyn duo takes post behind a tangle of craggy wires and a small armada of pedals. Hunched over their table of technologic surprises, High Places perform with a near-surgical methodology. To recreate their intricate organic pop, they must constantly fiddle, turning knobs, whacking drum pads. Singer Mary Pearson even wears a bracelet of bells, which she teams with egg shakers and rain sticks. Every motion makes music. The inherent concentration High Places must employ to produce their sound creates a distance between them and their audience. But the duo merely tolerates the idea of performance. They have a demure presence, as if wishing to turn the spotlight away. High Places is more interested in the result of their performance, the sunlit pop and lush soundscapes that have become the band's trademark.

Pearson and cohort Rob Barber's shadows play upon a screen flickering with nature scenes. The images are appropriate, as there is a definite earthiness to their music. Tribal drums are a staple, layered with calypso beats, strange whistling and any tones that clang with brilliance and affection. Pearson's listless alto only adds to this beach-bum surrealism. Ever upbeat, the songs have a child-like playfulness, as if Pearson and Barber try to see how many sounds they can swirl together before they make too much of a mess. Each part on its own, however, is perfect in its simplicity. In "Head Spins," for example, Pearson sings, "When we sat on the floor/ I was floored/ I was floored" accompanied by two guitar lines, hand percussion, drums and a layer of metallic buzzing. As each segment repeats, the music swells and the walls shake. Pearson and Barber shrink away, disappearing under the weight of it, until only the music is left.

The flesh suit guy is onstage and he's dancing like an invertebrate. Decked out in a cream-colored unitard and thick, black shades, he is the embodiment of this strange scene. The Presets have one more song to play, and the temperature inside the Fine Line is far past boiling. It has the aroma of meat burps and that disease that makes people smell like maple syrup. There is a creepy old man trying to dance on me. And the floor is shaking so viciously it feels like it might give way at any moment, forcing a throng of hipsters who look like they stepped off of a two year-old cover of Nylon fashion magazine to continue their wretched dancing sprawled out on the basement floor. Covered in booze. Covered in sweat. Covered in longing.

In a word, it's "manic."

With columns of rainbow fluorescent lights and a bipolar strobe light, there is the mood of a late 80's rave, but with a severe lack of illegal drugs and unabashed groping. The groping part could likely be the unpleasant side effect of the Presets' apparent trance-inducing prowess. There's a 96.5 percent chance the Australian duo could break into a synth-heavy version of the Macarena and the first 13 rows of people would still fucking lose it.

Wearing an irradiated-looking day glo orange suit jacket, Julian Hamilton is prancing about foppishly, making gestures akin to jazz hands. Flailing his arms to his New Wave-ish techno, he heads back to his vocoder to make erotic robot noises that really should have been the soundtrack to Tron. Meanwhile, a fiend on the sidelines is whipping around with glow sticks poking out of the top of his head like devil horns.

What really makes it work are the live drums so often absent in club music. With Kim Moyes by Hamilton's side trading his high hat duties for spins behind the keyboard, the Presets rage through "Down Down Down," "Girl (You Chew My Mind Up)," and "Are You The One?" along with "Talk Like That" from the band's new album, Apocalypso, and others.

Cut Copy's set is decidedly less fantastic. Here's the cringe-worthy blow-by-blow:

Rampant hand claps: minus 10 points

Stevie Nicks song dedication: minus 5 points

Continued overuse of handclaps: minus 10 additional points

Seemingly choreographed "point at the sky" gestures: minus 8 points

Moments of sonic disillusionment: plus 4 points

Vocalized demands to "Get our dance on": oh my god

Promotion of plaid shirt-wearing indie heartthrob stereotype: minus infinity

Depending on how many points Cut Copy started out with, they probably aren't going to pass popstar school. Maybe they should try degrees in sociology.

Cut Copy sounds like a danceable Smiths, but with a lower douchebag factor, or maybe an Air for the club kids instead of its target audience, the stay-at-home mopers and drinkers of red wine. The scruffy Canadians stand like Alpine statues, remaining immobile aside from the aforementioned handclaps. It's like listening to their album surrounded by sweaty twenty-somethings in tight pants instead of a real concert. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Once listeners get past the fact that every song seems to have the same tempo, the music has its pleasure. The tunes have a certain Chaka Khan production quality buried deep in the core of its glacier pop that remains effective in getting the crowd to continue to test the endurance of the dance floor. And Dan Whitford's acrylic blend tenor is so sleek and emotionless it sounds like it might actually be seeping from the plastic, painted lips of a department store mannequin. It's an interesting approach to songs about love and heartbreak.

During "Zap Zap," Whitford's hair is blowing from a fake breeze. On the staircase beside the stage, the Presets' Moyes is leading a barely legal brunette upstairs for a better view. His work is done. But for the legions on the dance floor, the night is far from over.

It's four in the morning, and the party isn't quite ending, but it will soon. You're not quite sure how you got here - at some point during the night you were drunker than you thought you were, and an adventurous friend who probably shouldn't have been driving convinced you to ride shotgun to this warehouse-cum-loft. The music is still playing but it's quieter now, or maybe your ears have just finally built up their tolerance for it. That one attractive-in-a-goth-way drunk girl is dancing by herself, the last one left on the concrete floor. Still the speakers spew techno-ish music.

Meanwhile, you're in a conversation - or rather, you're listening to some guy who seems too old to be here, but who clearly doesn't realize this himself, what with his tight shiny shirt and blonde-tipped gray hair - as he talks about politics and metaphysics and the collage he's working on (comprised of pipe cleaners, acrylic paint, and his sense of whimsy). But it's all so ridiculous you're digging it. Yeah - you're jiving with this atmosphere, nodding your head and agreeing with things you don't understand.

Or maybe you're just listening to (Emphasis Added), the new compilation/composition from local loopers Escape Mechanism.

One half DJ mixtape, one half found object, (Emphasis Added) is a consistently engaging assemblage of noise. It's the kind of thing that I want to call a ‘concept album,' without having any real notion of what that ‘concept' is supposed to be. That's okay, though...they have a website that kind of explains it! (Re)Cycling through snippets of music, movie quotes, laugh tracks, and various ambient sounds, Escape Mechanism concocts melodies that are entirely foot-tap-able. Yeah - it's Girl Talk for intellectuals.

You can pay attention to it, or not. As a whole, the album retains a droning Steve Reich quality - each song builds but builds minimally - so it's easy to zone out and write a review of the album while you're actually listening to it. (The "Theme" interludes are especially conducive to this.) Otherwise, for the more diligent among us, one can listen intently and begin to glean a message.

Early in "Change" - the album's first piece - we hear the line, "If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll get more of what you've got." This can be taken as (Emphasis Added)'s anthem, as each song is comprised of looped samples that are repeated again and again. On a broader level, regarding the current election season, it seems this mantra might be a warning about becoming too comfortable with the status quo (the status quo being not so quo, anymore...faltering economy, etc. etc. This is a music review, I know). Given that the songs have titles like, "Change," "Next," "What's Happening," "Oh Well," and "The Truth," though, there does seem to be something at least vaguely political going on. While repetition is a defining aspect of the album, all the songs do morph, and some, in a sense, self-destruct. Hidden in the final track is the phrase, "What we really have to work on is changing it around," which seems an apt conclusion to the themes we've just been treated to.

But again, even if you're not totally into the whole deconstruction thing, (Emphasis Added) is still effective on a purely acoustic level. Considering how much unavoidable noise there is in our world - commercials, lawn mowers, ring tones, older sisters - and that it's precisely this sort of noise which constitutes Escape Mechanism's prima materia, it's nice that at least they package it in a way that makes it more appetizing to our aural palates.

I didn't even get my shorts down. With five buttons and a zip, it takes a reasonable 20 seconds for me to accomplish this. Within this time, two bartenders busted in to kick me out. OK, I might have been in the men's restroom. This was only because I waited approximately three to five minutes at the ladies' and made the logical conclusion that the woman in there was dead. I checked to make sure no one was inside the men's, and then made my move. Obviously, I'm not that slick.

Such boldness by a pissing revolutionary is not tolerated at the Uptown Bar. Run by the rock and roll gestapo, the establishment, with its horrible acoustics, date-rape lighting and faulty equipment, is inherently anti-fun. But just like the poetry escaping the war-torn regions of Israel and Palestine, tonight's musicians still found a way to eke out some artistry and excitement in this godforsaken shit hole.

Perhaps this is why visiting Nebraskans UUVVWWZ seemed semi-insane. Singer Teal Gardner could rightly be the second coming of Lydia Lunch, with her feral, braying alto and tribal thrashing. But the band, with a definite Velvet Underground influence and hidden penchant for noise music, exceeds Lunch and her Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in that they understand the need to pull back before your eardrums explode. They get the delicate balance between pleasure and pain, friction and whatever the form of anti-friction is called, or apocalypse and ultimate salvation, if you're into that kind of thing. The four piece throbbed in one aural spasm and unleashed a colossal wave of frantic emotion with their strange droning. UUVVWWZ was also visually stimulating, dancing like those puppets on Shining Time Station that lived in the jukebox. Even a brief listen to the band's self-titled full length proves they ought to be on an indie watch list, with their blend of blues, noise and the dark side of 60's psychedelic. A line lifted from their record jacket explains it best: My mom told me I've got a dead sister lifestyle. Do you know what it's like to listen to that? I'll tell you what it's like: It's like your record.

Fellow Nebraskan Darren Keen of The Show Is The Rainbow was even more spastic and frightening with his 100 percent total chaos. Writhing in the middle of the crowd, this one man, one laptop tour de force was part metal mayhem, part punk rocker reject and most assuredly techno's bastard child. His music was the epitome of mash-up-all played out in front of an epileptic shock-inducing video screen blaring violent, neon colors and some rather unattractive photos of Johnny Rotten.

MC/VL's buoyant old-school beats came as a relief to the evening's top-quality, but nevertheless neurotic, rock and roll. The local duo carried the allure of 80's hip hop, back when it was fun, and far less bloody, and face-sized clocks seemed like passable fashion accessories. Mighty Clyde and Vicious Lee mused about such timeless issues like partying and sucka MCs, while updating this classic approach with poignant modern samples from the likes of Air and Interpol. This isn't to say older samples like Metallica, AC/DC and a particularly well-placed reference to Joan Jett's cover of "Crimson and Clover" weren't equally effective. Like most things brilliant, MC/VL's music is slightly drunken, slightly stupid and pure gold. Live, the high-energy duo shatters the notion of a "stage" show, constantly penetrating the crowd and turning it into a sweaty mess.

Vicious Lee lives out his daylight hours as his alter ego, David Hansen, a CityPages' music writer. One would think this would give Lee/Hansen a particularly keen insight into operating a band, or at least a severe vinyl addiction. But, let the record show (cue screeching record sound bite) David Hansen hates music.

"This could potentially incriminate me as both a musician and a music writer," Hansen says. "Both my musical journalism and musical career are equally informed by my hatred of music."

Maybe Hansen chooses to express himself through music because he thinks music is "the least bad art form, with the possible exception of literature." Regardless, he pardons the old-school hip hop that so influences his style.

"I love what it once was," he says. "But it has been perversely high-jacked by intensely talented literary minds who have no flair for performance, which bothers me. This used to be dance music. It's just not anymore."

Hansen's first exposure to the genre came from his apparently hip older brother. He brought home LL Cool J's Radio.

"I still listen to it, and I still hear amazing nuances in it and this amazing bravado and this really great assertive form of arrogance that is very benign, which I think hip hop has lost a lot of," he says. "A lot of the arrogance and the bravado that goes on with hip hop now is this incredibly malevolent, toxic form of confidence. It's really alarming. Before rappers just rapped about how awesome they were, and now they just rap about how many girls they fuck and how much money they make. Rap should be essentially meaningless"

MC/VL, however, does have purpose. Poetry has its place, and so do those tearjerker Hallmark commercials. But the power to get bony, drunken indie kids to dance like it's 1986 could be the best power of them all.