Posts Tagged ‘ Villain ’

A Place to Bury Strangers: March 3, 2017 Villain

March 16, 2017
By

Two years on from their tour de force performance at Music Hall of Williamsburg and the release of their last album, Transfixiation, A Place to Bury Strangers found themselves at the faux-DIY venue Villain doing what they’ve done best in years past, while looking also to the future. If the controlled chaos of set opener “We’ve Come So Far” took on a different meaning in 2017, it also felt like it took on a greater one. APTBS vets know what to expect from their shows at this point — a blanket of noise anchored by Oliver Ackermann’s guitars (his expertise in pedals comes in handy), almost always at maximum intensity, a delightfully disorienting light show — and their Brooklyn shows reflect the communal vibe among those people.

As it has been a couple years since their last record (though they did just release a new song), I was unfamiliar with several of the (what I think were new) songs played, but the distinction for most of us was minimal. An APTBS show is less about this or that song than the overall experience, the subtle shifts in texture and tempo, the often-dark lyrics that you at-times strain to hear, the relentlessness of Ackermann (in particular) onstage, as he smashes the hell out of his guitar long before the end of the set. Where the last APTBS show found the band playing on the Music Hall floor, this time the band took advantage of Villain’s layout and performed a more electronic-driven closing sequence of four songs from the balcony. When the beats finally stopped, you couldn’t help but feel a little bit lighter, a bit freer. At some point “cathartic” might start to feel like an overused term in these times, but in these first months, it’s still a very accurate one.

I recorded this set with a soundboard feed combined with Schoeps MK41V microphones from the audience. The sound quality is excellent. Enjoy!

Download the complete show: [MP3/FLAC/Apple Lossless]

Stream the complete show: 

A Place to Bury Strangers
2017-03-03
Villain
Brooklyn, NY USA

Exclusive download hosted at nyctaper.com
Recorded and produced by acidjack

Soundboard + Schoeps MK41V (FOB, ROC, PAS)>KCY>Z-PFA>>Zoom F8>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (align, mix down, fades, compression)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, effects)>Audacity 2.0.3 (track, amplify, balance, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks [Setlist help greatly appreciated]
01 We’ve Come So Far
02 [unknown1] “Never coming back”
03 So Far Away
04 Deadbeat
05 Fill the Void
06 [unknown2] “Sucking on the trigger of a gun”
07 Drill It Up
08 [unknown3] “I don’t care / I don’t mind”
09 I’ve Lived My Life to Stand In the Shadow of Your Heart

[Performed from the balcony — audience mics only]
10 [unknown4]
11 [unknown5]
12 [unknown6]
13 [unknown7]

PLEASE SUPPORT A Place to Bury Strangers, visit their website, and buy Transfixiation from Dead Oceans here. Also check out their latest song, a contribution to “Our First 100 Days,” here.

Jeff Rosenstock: November 18, 2016 Villain BK

January 12, 2017
By

It is an objective fact that Jeff Rosenstock released one of the best albums of 2016, if not the best record of the year. WORRY is a work that exhibits all of the positive qualities of contemporary punk by one of the genre’s most consistently excellent and prolific performers over the last two decades. During that time, Rosenstock has been a virtually unlimited fount of quality music, having participated as band member, contributor or producer in something like thirty albums in the last fifteen years. But Rosenstock’s recent solo albums may be his highest quality output of his career. WORRY builds on the overwhelming success of his excellent 2015 album We Cool?. The fan response to it crashed the SideOneDummy Records website on the day of its release.

WORRY is album that walks the listener through a set of modern problems in a series of songs that touch on multiple genres all anchored by the indefatigable Jeff Rosenstock. Early in his career Rosenstock fronted a ska-punk band and then an anarchist-punk band but in his late thirties he’s now not beholden to any particular genre. The album touches on themes of loneliness, oppression, politics and music — all of which are pointless without our emotional investment in other people. Indeed “…While You’re Alive” concludes as the penultimate track on the record, by declaring that ultimately “Love is Worry”. We may never be able to achieve a perfect existence (“Perfect Sound Whatever”), but if we appreciate the small events, we’ll be truly alive. Its a simple but effective message from a performer who has spent his career confronting negativity and apathy with a singular work ethic and drive.

The Jeff Rosenstock Fall Tour came to a close on a cold November night in a converted warehouse in Brooklyn a mere ten days after perhaps the most devastating political moment of our lives. The final night of the tour was filled with much love and appreciation for the bands and fans who had supported him throughout, but the night was also fueled by purposeful rage and resistance. Rosenstock dealt with these issues throughout the set but also focused on the healing power of music. The set drew primarily from We Cool? and WORRY material, including an epic segue of the last eleven songs from WORRY to close the set. The band encored with “Police on My Back”, which Rosenstock unfortunately noted as a Clash song. Perhaps the only down moment of the night was that he failed to call attention to the composers of that song, The Equals — a 1960s racially-integrated London band who experienced actual police oppression of immigrant culture. Its a theme sadly still relevant nearly fifty years after the release of that song. Otherwise, the night was an inspiration and Jeff Rosenstock continues to cement his status as perhaps the most important punk artist composing today. Moving forward through 2017 and after, we’re going to need artists like Rosenstock whose life’s work is hell bent on resisting the wave of hate and intolerance bubbling up from the worst aspects of our society.

Jeff Rosenstock is back on tour next month, including two local shows. The just-announced Antarctigo Vespucci (Rosenstock and Chris Farren) show at Trans-Pecos is February 11, and a Jeff Rosenstock date opening for Menzingers at Irving Plaza is on March 30. All dates HERE.

I recorded this set with the Neumann hypers mounted at the soundboard on the far right and mixed with a board feed. The balance and mix took a while the get right but I believe this is now an excellent recording that definitely captures the energy of that great night. Enjoy!

Download the Complete Show [MP3] / [FLAC]

Stream the Complete Show:

Jeff Rosenstock
2016-11-18
Villain
Brooklyn NY

Digital Master Recording
Soundboard + Audience Matrix

Soundboard [Engineer: Ryan] + Neumann KM-150 Hypers > Sound Devices 744t > 2 x 24bit 48kHz wav files > Soundforge (post-production) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3 and tagging via Foobar)

Recorded and Produced by nyctaper

Setlist:
[Total Time 1:08:27]
01 Wave Goodnight To Me
02 I’m Serious I’m Sorry
03 Hey Allison
04 Pash Rash
05 [banter – on tour]
06 To Be a Ghost
07 Festival Song
08 [banter – donations]
09 Beers Again Alone
10 Nausea
11 [banter – Worry]
12 Pietro 60 Years Old
13 I Did Something Weird Last Night
14 Blast Damage Days
15 Bang on the Door
16 Rainbow
17 Planet Luxury
18 HELLLLHOOOOLE
19 June 21st
20 The Fuzz
21 While You’re Alive
22 Perfect Sound Whatever
23 You In Weird Cities
24 [encore break]
25 Teenager
26 Police on My Back [The Equals]

SUPPORT Jeff Rosenstock: Bandcamp | Tumblr | Buy WORRY at SideOneDummy Records

Ryley Walker: November 3, 2016 Villain

November 16, 2016
By

ryley_sierra_starno

[Photo by Sierra Starno on Instagram]

The second time I saw Ryley Walker happened to be not long after I had received some bad news. I had immersed myself in his music since encountering him at Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh some months before. This time, I knew what to expect from him, but on a personal level, I felt unmoored in a way that I hadn’t in years. What struck me as he poured himself into “Summer Dress” that afternoon at Rough Trade in 2014 was not that the actual words he was saying necessarily spoke to my condition, but the way they sounded. Part of the beauty of Walker’s work is that his often-obtuse lyrics can be a blank canvas, albeit one surrounded by a complex web of sound. I couldn’t speculate what Ryley had experienced in order to pen these songs, but whatever it was, somehow, hearing him experience it made me feel better.

This show, at the multipurpose Williamburg venue Villain (relocated from the temporarily re-shuttered Market Hotel), took place less than week before what would become the most catastrophic political event in my lifetime, so I can’t say that it gave me the same level of comfort at the time. Listening back to this performance now, though, I think this music once again serves the same purpose. Even in the darkest of times, there are voices that speak to us, that lift us up, that remind us why it’s worth it to go on.

This set came at the rollicking end of the band’s U.S. tour. And I do mean band. As has been the case with recent shows I’ve seen, Ryley arrived with not only the stalwarts Ryan Jewell on drums and Anton Hatwich on bass, but he also had sometime musical partner Bill MacKay there to do double duty with him on guitar. It befitted not only this larger room (you can hear its size in the recording) but the direction Ryley has preferred of late, with his album songwriting serving as more of a jumping off point to dense psychedelic folk jams, Grateful Dead-style, than as pieces to stand by themselves. To wit, this show of just four songs was the longest I’ve seen by Walker yet–over 80 minutes long.

One of Walker’s more interesting paradoxes is how different his between-song persona is from the music he plays. To the same degree that his songs drift toward melancholy and darkness, the guy that shows up in between traffics in an exuberant, could-give-a-fuck abandon, cracking jokes about showing up at the wrong kind of “improv” party, talking about his band of accomplished jazz players as if they’re no different than the twenty-year-old punk knuckleheads down the block. Maybe that’s right–maybe they’re not. Music itself may often be serious, but it doesn’t have to be somber, at least in a room of friends.

My favorite of this night’s numbers was a song from Ryley’s latest, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, that I hadn’t seen live yet. This twenty-three minute version of “Age Old Tale” began with a sustained ambient noise jam that paid homage to this neighborhood’s roots (“this is where you’d have gone to see a noise band fifteen years ago” Ryley said of the room, or something approximate). If you’d walked in during this song, you might have had no idea that the best comparison that certain corporate publications can come up with for Ryley is Van Morrison. It might be true of his albums, to a point, but what you experience in the room is something else entirely, and a sustaining reason why I personally never miss his shows. We need music right now. We especially need music like this.

I recorded this set with a soundboard feed from the FOH Ryan together with Schoeps MK4V microphones back by the soundboard. If I do say so myself, it’s pretty fucking cool that I got a shoutout from stage during the process of recording this. This isn’t one of the easier rooms, sound-wise, but based on the music alone, this recording should be a must-add to your collection.

Download the complete show: [MP3/FLAC/ALAC]

Stream the complete show:

Ryley Walker
2016-11-03
Villain
Brooklyn, NY USA

Exclusive download hosted at nyctaper.com
Recorded and produced by acidjack

Soundboard (engineer: Ryan) + Schoeps MK4V (DFC, at SBD)>KCY>Z-PFA>Zoom F8>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CC (compression, fades)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, effects, image)>Audacity 2.0.3 (track, amplify, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 [intro banter]
02 The Roundabout
03 [banter2]
04 Sullen Mind
05 [banter3]
06 Age Old Tale
07 [banter4]
08 Funny Thing She Said

Band
Ryley Walker
Bill MacKay – Guitar
Anton Hatwich – Bass
Ryan Jewell – Drums

PLEASE SUPPORT Ryley Walker: Website | Twitter | “Ryley Walker Bootlegs” (his word, not ours)

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