The Loom/Arms
Pianos
1/6/09

Brooklyn’s DIY scene has had its year. Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and High Places all saw loads of attention from the media in 2008. And while this scene will continue to thrive, the ever-present lack of attention span and need for something new by indie fans and bloggers means that this might not be the scene that gets all the attention in 2009.

Watching The Loom at Pianos on Tuesday night, I couldn’t help but think that maybe it’s finally time for the chamber pop scene to get its proper attention. Chamber pop scene? Well, yes. Over the last few years, there has been bunch of new bands with big lush sounds and poppy hooks. With the start of a Pianos residency, history suggests that The Loom have success on the horizon, as many popular local bands have done the same.

Along with The Loom, Frances, The Silent League, This is Ivy League, Hopewell, Harlem Shakes, La Strada, Ravens & Chimes and The Lisps are all making pop music with all the bells and whistles. A big year for this scene makes perfect sense, as a reaction to the overload of new music being produced that sounds like it’s been tape-recorded in a garbage can with Coby stereo.

These bands are not your average kids who just recently learned 3 chords after drunkenly deciding to start a band. Instead, they’re filled with multi-talented artists with formal training, who’ve studied Stravinsky and Charles Mingus just as much as they’ve listened to The Beatles and REM.

It may only take one of these bands for the scene to take off, and Tuesday night’s performance by The Loom proved that they’re just as likely to make it happen as Frances. The 6-piece played a sparkling set of beautifully composed songs that often utilized slide guitar, French horn and mandolin. Every instrument seems vital in the arrangements, each adding an extra element to the songs. Particularly, the best of the bunch were the songs that featured slide guitar.

Arms (above), the side project of Harlem Shakes guitarist Todd Goldstein, followed The Loom on Tuesday with a much more stripped down solo set. Equipped with only a guitar (or occasionally ukelele), Goldstein still managed to totally captivate the room with his intimate bedroom pop songs. After having recently hearing comparisons to Mark Kozelek, I finally caught some of those connections in his guitar arrangements, but Goldstein’s is more uplifting than Kozelek’s incredibly saddening tone.

The Loom continues their Pianos residency on January 13, and 27.
Arms plays A Benefit for NYC After-School Programs at The Belll House on Sunday January 18 with The Forms, Ford & Fitzroy, and Frances.

A funny sort of economics governs the world of music piracy. Those who buy usually do so out of morality. Those who steal steal with some misgiving, but they're too poor for the moral cost to outweigh the financial benefits. Apple's new iTunes pricing plan might bring the threshhold—the point when you agree that it's worth it to support the artists you like—a little closer.

Now Apple, which previously set all song prices at 99 cents, will allow record companies to choose between 69 cent, 99 cent and $1.29 price tags. Apple is loosening the reins in exchange for a new freedom brokered to it by record companies: Songs no longer come with those pesky chastity belts, "digital rights management" locks, that keep you from sharing them with friends. Apple does a pretty good job of building the presumption that they are the only option, the alpha and omega of the technology universe, but we'd like to remind you that there is actually a plethora of choices when it comes to music downloads. Our current favorite is eMusic, an NYC-based company that collects monthly subscriptions and stocks mostly underground, hard-to-find tracks.Where are your Captain Beefheart B-sides, iTunes?

While catching up on our blog reading, we caught this intriguing post amid all the materialism and hot girls on Kanye West's blog:

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It's not unusual to leave a show at the Bowery Ballroom with your ears ringing, but after last night's show by Scottish rockers Glasvegas, the crowd spilling out onto Delancey Street was seeing spots. The band, which played a short, sweet set, employed a set of insanely bright lights to punctuate its songs, leaving more than a few audience members covering their eyes as they sang along to the Wire-by-way-of-the-Shangri-La's tunes. 

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As if coming back to work after the holidays wasn't bad enough, today legendary Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton was found dead in his Michigan home. Iggy might look like a scary handbag now, but we'll always have a soft spot for those boys. Check out a video of the band after the jump.

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The gang at Buffetlibre have unleashed their second Rewind project, where they ask up-and-coming acts to submit covers or remixes of oldies-but-goodies for the masses. You may not have heard of many of these bands yet, but the first edition's alumni include Dragonette, Purple Crush, Cannonball Jane and FrankMusik, and this one features buzzy acts like Starfucker, Little Boots, Heads We Dance, and AC Slater.

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Missed it? Well, so what. Knitting Factory finally closed its doors in Tribeca with a promise to open in Brooklyn in March. But we're not sure anyone even cares. We reported in November about all the employees being let go and the strangeness surrounding the transfer of power amongst the owners and promoters. But does anyone even pay attention or care anymore? The end of year apathy only seemed to continue for the final performance. Akron/Family headlined with additional performances by Deerhoof, our fave Dirty Projectors and Deer Tick (aka John McCauley).

NYTimes has a slideshow of the final show here.

Photo of Akron/Family courtesy of nariposa via Flickr.

The Chicago Tribune reported that disc sales fell nearly 20 percent, to 362.6 million, "the seventh decline in eight years, according to SoundScan's report, which was released Wednesday." At the same time, online downloads reached a milestone: Over 1 billion songs were bought online. But that doesn't mean the music industry isn't still fucked. Overall, album sales were down 8.5 percent and "every musical genre reported across-the-board declines in album sales, and holiday sales were off by 19 percent."

This isn't probably surprising news to most of us. Can you remember the last time you visited a record store? When you actually paid money to purchase a NEW CD, packaged in a jewel case? We didn't think so. My situation is abnormal since we are sent review copies of most albums and so don't feel compelled to rush out to buy anything (yes, I know, it sounds so horrible). So I've asked friends about it. People who remember how a leisurely Saturday would be spent at the Virgin Megastore, putting on those clunky headphones and listening at the displays to music that you may not have heard otherwise. Of course, now you can do that from your computer: Mp3 tracks are everywhere you look and friends recommend myspace pages and link to favorite new acts via Facebook. We wonder how much longer the Virgin Megastore at Union Square will be around and have started the Virgin Death Watch, expecting the clock to expire sometime later this year. We've already been dreaming up what would replace the anchor store that has evolved into a meeting destination for so many folks. Will it be another big box retailer? Or will there be some more radical transformation, as shown in the Big Box Reuse book that came out recently.

This apathy to music consumption doesn't just present a problem for the labels and musicians. We at the paper also wonder what our place is in the musical firmament. Where alt newsweeklies like ours were once the barometer of taste, able to give coverage to emerging artists, helping kickstart a career and raise them from obscurity, now a band can get more exposure just from being featured in an iPod commercial or as incidental music for a tween TV show.

Jon Pareles recently touched on this in his excellent piece "Songs From the Heart of a Marketing Plan" on Dec. 24. In it he talks about how "selling out," once anathema to musicians looking for street cred, is now the industry standard and expected from even the most "radical" sort. Take for example Santogold, who blew up this year and whose "bohemian manifesto," as Pareles calls the song "Creator" from Santogold's self-titled album released in 2008, is now in a beer commercial and a hair gel commercial. Pareles asks the question: "What happens to the music itself when the way to build a career shifts from recording songs that ordinary listeners want to buy to making music that marketers can use?" And that's exactly right. The music industry is already transforming.

The Chicago Tribune story admits that no one is tracking how much money is made from licensing music or from these "360 deals" that LiveNation and others are concocting. Labels may not be making money from actual music sales, but they are now racking up big bucks by licensing songs and selling the music as a lifestyle brand. So much of the indie music now doesn't seem to be much more than entertaining distraction that reminds us of something we liked when we were teenagers. Oh, that sounds like the Cure! I can listen to it until that band that reminds me of Paul Simon comes up with something new. Music is rarely challenging anymore and that may be due to the fact that it needs to be palatable to be a catchy new Mac advertisement. Musicians have one mission: Create hooks, not history. Hmm. Maybe it's about time for some renegade movement to crash the party and fuck with the system. Wasn't that why punk was originally created in the first place? A non-professional, noisy, non-musical affront to all these capitalist sensibilities. But are there kids these days who can fathom doing something and it not turning into a profit-making machine. That's my wish for 2009.

The atmosphere was thick with Eastern European accents at Webster Hall last night as gypsy-circus outfit Gogol Bordello held the first of three end of year NYC shows. Nothing gets a sold-out crowd more loaded and loose than a good support act though and psychedelic rockers Apollo Sunshine delivered a masterful set.

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