Tepid fuss: The Killers in concert

The Killers were impressive. In that they left an impression. I hope it was the one they intended.

Failed vision and children
My vision was skewed, as it happens. The hipsters stayed home, quietly hating themselves. The top 40 set came, but not the right ones. This concert belonged to the kids, aged 8 to 15. Throngs of them. Entire classrooms/daycare centers paired off and followed dutifully behind wild-eyed adults. The grownups looked tired and thankful for the buddy system.

Before the show started I had to spend ten minutes or so defending my Bright Eyes review, again. I'm getting good at it. Compromise is the key. That was up in the all ages section with its free ice water and soft drinks. The bartenders looked like they wanted to isolate a few of the preteens and shake them down for their milk money to make up for the lost tips.

Chris DeCleur, Publisher of the Sandpoint Reader; Josh Hedlund, singer-songwriter, and I went downstairs for adult drinks and a better view. That's when the party started. We'd been trying to talk to the eight year olds, but they really couldn't keep up intellectually. Chris was discussing the vagaries of the newspaper trade while I quietly scolded a girl in pig tails for not knowing the square root of 81. Josh interrupted a game of Yu Gi Oh to ask a diminutive Asian child if he'd ever known real heartache. He hadn't.

The grownup floor was more our speed. The opening band began their set just after we got our drinks. Tegan and Sara. Their sound was compelling and their lyricism earnest, and it was fun to watch the two girls bob around onstage, trade guitars and lead vocal duties, then try and guess which is Tegan and which is Sara. They never tell. They introduced their band, told us where they were from [drummer from Castlegar, parents in the audience], but left their own identities uncertain.

Chris figured the girl on the right was Tegan because she seemed more comfortable onstage, and that would naturally lead to her getting first billing. I thought it was the girl on the left, because she had hipper bangs. Later, as we left, Tegan and Sara were working their t-shirt booth. Chris and I almost went up and asked them, but the line was long and some questions are best left unanswered.

As we played this game, a woman mistook our glee for mockery.

Woman of indeterminate age: You don't like them?
Chris: No, I do.
Me: Yeah, I like them.
WoIA: [faintly slurring] They remind me of a band I listened to when I was younger.
C: Pat Benatar?

Good thing she'd had a few grownup drinks.

Halfway through their set, Teigen and Sara slowed it down a little bit, playing back to back songs which would have, in a simpler time, been called ballads.

The youth of Spokane began to pogo. Then mosh. Then crowd surf.

"That's never happened before," said either Tegan or Sara.

Tegan's [or Sara's] voice has a pretty unique affectation. Like Eartha Kitt and Minnie Mouse. Maybe a little Billy Joel at times. Coquettish and soulful, but with pomp and an odd upturn. Chris said it sounded like the Cure, but not British, or male.

I'll leave it to the reader to choose the more evocative.

Tore Up
Between sets Chris and I marveled some more at the preteens. Josh returned to dwell among them. Someone poked the guy next to me, who had mockingly head-banged his way through the Tegan and Sara set. They knew each other, kind of. Well enough to know they drank at the same bar in Pullman, but not well enough to know each other's major. Filled with energy [verve?], his was broadcast journalism. His hair was a post-modern take on David Schwimmer's. Moments later another person walked up. If the first guy was an anchor, this had to be his producer.

Anchorman: What's up you slut. I'm trashed!
The Producer: This band, playing--on CD--these guys are called British Sea Power.
A: God I'm f__ked up--f__ked the f__k up!
P: They're great aren't they? They're in the studio--
A: Aaaaooooo
P: --it's just, no one plays them because no one knows them.
A: Tight.
P: Yeah, tight, I love--
A: Tight, I'm hammered! Aaaaooooo!
P: Anyway, if you like them they're called British Sea Power.

Anchorman was a ball of energy, The Killers' entire set was a never ending succession of fist pumps, devil horns and vehemence. He used his entire body. My position behind him was such that he'd tag my junk on the backswing and clip my face on the follow through. To my companions, from the balcony, it might have looked like I was dancing. I was avoiding the devil horns. Anchorman responded to every statement by adding a degree of intensity to whatever adjective had just been used.

P: That's such a good song.
A: GREAT!

P: These guys are great.
A: AWESOME!

P: I'm pretty buzzed.
A: TORE THE F__K UP! Aaaaooooo!

Everytime he howled, he looked back at me to see if I was feeling him.

The rest of the crowd joined Anchorman and the Woman of Indeterminate Age in rapturous ecstasy throughout The Killers set. The object of their considerable affection, though, was unequal to it.

Skin, bone, guts, hearts
There is little doubt that The Killers are a technically accomplished band, but there are lots of tight ensembles that are never able to transcend being accomplished musicians to become something approaching artists. The encore was a microcosm of their set--of their entire sound. The first song, unreleased in the US, was "Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll", wherein Flowers mocks the sincerity of acts like Pedro the Lion and Postal Service [and Tegan and Sara for that matter] as childish. Rather than distance themselves from love songs, though, The Killers choose to revel in the sentimentality they mock, hemorrhaging sarcasm and disingenuousness with every song.

Flowers has figured out quite a few charades-like movements to mirror his lyrics. This is designed to make him seem cute and knowing. Josh said he was prancing around like Mick Jagger's understudy, stalking around and gesticulating. He seemed more practiced to me, like Billy Joe Armstrong lampooning Dean Martin. A snide post-punk crooner. Two video screens on each side added to this effect, framing the plaid-sport-coated Flowers in washed out monochrome, a la Ed Sullivan.

Despite understanding the irony that most indie bands all sound the same, every Killers song is just that, a generic mix of arena-ized Britpop and new wave synth [Meaning Brandon Flowers occasionally plays a keyboard].

Put differently: The Killers drink from the pot they piss in.

The final song was worse, because it began with a hint of saccharine honesty, "This song is about skin. This song is about bone. This song is about guts. This song is about heart."

It seemed like too much to ask that they'd add a dash of sincerity to the end of their set. Perhaps hoping to walk away with a good impression, I kinda ignored the lyrics until the coda, "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier." Maddening.

The crowd surfing continued as people pulled out their lighters and struck them. Many of the field trip chaperones had brought enough for their kids. As Flowers sang, "I got soul, but I'm not a soulja," drowning us in irony, everyone was enraptured, thankful for this postmodern deluge--this fake-schmaltz baptism--perhaps failing to realize that The Killers openly mock exactly the devotion they elicit.

I think we deserved better.

Read the full thing here.

Being and Rhyme

The Books : Lost and Safe
Since being death-marched through Victorian literature – the poems of the Brownings, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, et al coming one after another, endlessly, like footsteps composing a lit student's Trail of Tears – I've been on holiday from proper poetry. I've gradually forgotten how much depends on a red wheel barrow and for whom the caged bird sings. In the place of such ephemera I now concern myself with how to dismantle atomic bombs, among other things.

Most often, when I choose to think about it, I like that pop and indie rock are able to convey most of the ideas and emotions of traditional poetic forms without needing a dictionary, a Bible, a slide-rule and a copy of Aesop to understand what the hell is going on.

What I miss is the sense of historical context poetry often brings, as well as the meditation and variations on classical forms. I miss the layers of meaning.

When something manages to bridge that chasm, to be both contemporary and historically-minded, both allusive and accessible, the effect is jarring. Also a little frustrating. I wonder why everything can't be like this thing here, whatever it is.

Listening to The Books creates that effect.

Their latest album, Lost and Safe is lots of things at once. Found sounds intermingle with banjos, industrial percussion, Nick Zammuto's half-spoken lyrics, big ideas, nonsense poetry, indecisive found soliloquies, and enough staccato mandolin to force Captain Corelli's unconditional surrender.

[When I can't properly describe something, I make lists. And jokes.]

The paradox being that the dissonance somehow seems to create harmony. Each track is viscerally magnetic and still earnestly contemplative.

[Somehow. Whatever that means. Maybe I should try to say something knowing and profound about the process itself]

Found voices and sounds are usually a tough sell. Above the technical difficulty of making the voice of a parliamentarian mesh with the clanking of dishes and the broadcast of an all-points-bulletin, the artist assumes the added difficulty of not looking like a self-indulgent prick.

On Lost and Safe, The Books manage to explore their environment and contemplate the art of sound without being narcissistic or masturbatory.

[Somehow. I guess. Maybe this will be easier if I go track by track].

The album is worth buying just for “Vogt Dig for Kloppervok”, which sounds wet like a rain shower and rearranges lines from Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky (which feels damp itself) to create a thoughtful meditation on aggression.

On “Be Good to Them Always”, Zammuto's moan comes in alone initially before sublimating quietly beneath found voices, turning declarative statements about hardship into plaintive cries. Mimicry.

The glitchy beats pound out irregularly, like the clop of cavalry, but not boldly riding or well; rather, with uncertainty and trepidation.

Zammuto's voice slowly drowns out as the tone turns increasingly psychoanalytical and condemnatory, before a found voice returns to the same statement Zammuto made initially:

"You know, I simply cannot understand people / Oh how sadly we mortals are deceived by our imagination."

The same words, in a different context, at the beginning and end respectively, have vastly different meanings. The voices are now barely audible over the march, as though we as humans can speak to our symptoms, but are blind to the underlying disease. And before we can identify it, life has already moved on. This feeling of obscured vision--of partial sight and missed opportunities--resurfaces throughout Lost and Safe.

“Smells Like Content" broods over another pervasive motif, The Books' seeming dissatisfaction with modernity and the answers it offers. There are no found voices until the last twenty seconds, but swells with rolling guitar; a simple, grungy percussion loop and Zammuto's vaguely existential ruminations.

"Most of all, the world was a place where reports of holes were described / within an overarching paradigm of clarity and accuracy / the context of which makes possible an underlying sense of the way it all fits together / despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such."

Zammuto then contradicts himself with an identical rhyme scheme. And then again. Once the found voice returns, its affected knowledge is unconvincing even to itself:

"Expectation leads to disappointment / If you don't expect something big, huge and exciting / usually, um I don't know it's just not as . . ."

The voice trails off.

In the context The Books have created, conventional wisdom seems as ineffectual as nihilism. Traditional authority is meaningless and the individual is unable to make up the gap.

[Somehow. Whatever that means].

If any of this sounds at all intriguing, Lost and Safe is probably the best place to start investigating The Books' sound. Of their three albums, it relies least on found sounds and voices, weaving what samples there are into careful balance with singer Nick Zammuto's voice.

It's storytelling by committee and of all the found voices on the album, perhaps the most important is the listener's. The result is immediately accessible and listenable, but as successive plays reveal new layers and details, it becomes more unsettling, perhaps as we realize that The Books have left one part of the composition for us to fill in ourselves.

On Lost and Safe, The Books poke at big ideas, but offer no theses. They seem content to leave those to us. Dispassionate analysis is always easier than contemplation and self-reflection. Maybe that's why Lost and Safe has been so tough to review. Any critique of Lost and Safe reflects back on the listener. That's an uncomfortable spot, but it's probably why I find myself replaying it compulsively.

[Alright, that wasn't bad, now just tie it back in]

Most days the line delineating pop from literary poetry – contemporary and throughout time – seems sharp and exact. Then, some days, I hear a band like The Books and suddenly I'm no longer sure. Those days feel important.

[A slightly more self-loathing version will appear in this week's Reader]

Read the full thing here.