Options for Tonight: Lady Sovereign, Bound Stems, Wrens, Beck

[Photo Credit]

Lady Sovereign @ 9:30 Club
Early Doors 5:30 PM
Young Love 6:30 PM
Lady Sovereign 7:45 PM

MP3: Lady Sovereign (ft. Missy Elliott) - "Love Me or Hate Me (Remix)"

Bound Stems @ DC9
We've been talking about these guys for a while now. This show is part of the DAM! Festival, and Bound Stems will be playing before De Novo Dahl tonight at DC9. I still have no idea what I am doing and if I will even make The Wrens, or this, or anything. I am knee deep in some grad school applications and the light at the end of the tunnel is dim and uninviting.

The Wrens @ Black Cat
SAT OCT 28
THE WRENS
+/- (PLUS/MINUS) & PALOMAR
$13 mainstage 9:30

The Best of the Rest
...can be found at DC's TourFilter. As for the couch potato set...

Beck on Saturday Night Live, 11:29 PM EDT
Beck - "Where It's At" (Saturday Night Live)


"For the second time in two years, the veteran singer/songwriter has made an album of sometimes clever and intriguing pastiche on which he's primarily working with the detritus of his own catalog." [Pitchfork: 6.9]

"Furthermore, the record is speckled with architectural inconsistencies that declassify each U-turn into new territories of sub-genre exploitation: pop hooks sabotage the funk jams, krautrock sprouts from old-school rap cadences, blues riffs find themselves surrounded by an infestation of surly catcalls. It's these concurrent oddities, absurdities, and stylistically-ignorant endearments, rifling through the album's gooey and often cavernous headspace, that cause The Information to congeal with unexpected ease. Perhaps the absence of this kind of collective subtext is what elicited the routine condemnation of last year's similarly eclectic Guero, which lacked an absurdist thread. Though it was unfairly criticized by some, Guero will most likely be seen, in hindsight, as a safer warm-up to The Information's wildly successful risk-taking. It's held together by its space-age hip-hop affectations, by its neo-psychedelic flashbacks, by its underlying acknowledgement that each 'fun' element has some kind of consequence embedded on its flipside. This may not sound like music of the future, but it's the kind of music that only the future could possibly make." [PopMatters: 8/10]

We haven't talked much about the album, but JK and I agree, Beck is pretty much a sure thing these days. Pitchfork thinks he is working from the detritus, I think that he is just plain getting down. While it isn't along the same lines as Guero that same manic craziness resonates throughout the entire work. I loved Guero, loved Sea Change, and well, I love this. Take your time to digest it, it's a strong move from a guy who consistently journeys further and further away from the mainstream and our own expectations of him.

Beck will perform on Saturday Night Live tonight with Hugh Laurie (the guy from House).

MP3: Beck - "Dark Star"
MP3: Beck - "Nausea"