All Points West: Radiohead and the Sounds of Now

If everything goes well this weekend, the East Coast and more conveniently, New York City, will have its own music festival that will rival the highwattage indie rock and arts gathering in the California desert, Coachella.

The All Points West Music and Arts Festival kicked off a three day run yesterday in Liberty State Park, NJ with a lineup of bands that was both diverse and very much now.


Liberty State Park is indeed the ideal location for a summer weekend of outdoor rock. The park faces the New York Harbor with the Manhattan skyline to the north and the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to the south. For many the festival began with the ferry ride from the South Street Seaport, allowing us New Yorkers to indulge our inner tourist as we passed Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls.

The grounds are centered around a woven wooden spire that one imagines ablaze. Part of the title of the festival does have the word art, which means in the big event format, large interactive installations. One attempt with this theme was a matrix of cylinders piping sound that visitors could walk through. Swerving through the crowd was an electric buggy ala Mad Max. The crowds seemed marginally interested in any of it and although the creative fun was well placed, the effect was distracting. Whimsy is a tough sell to goal oriented New Yorkers whose focus is on the three stages.

We arrived mid afternoon to catch The New Pornographers play from their latest album, "Challengers". The Canadian band's rotating cast of players was lacking singer Neko Case and they may have suffered from it. Among their new songs played, the upbeat "All the Show Stoppers" seemed a bit too loose. The "Challengers" a beautiful ballad, and one of my favorite songs of the year, features Case's vocals on the recording but today was sang well by Carl Newman. Even still, it's not the voice I fell for on the album.

After a few songs it was time for a quick change, Grizzly Bear was playing over at another stage. This Brooklyn band may represent one side of music's sound of now. Grizzly Bear specializes in expansive velvet dream pieces lead by the vocal talents of Chris Taylor. Taylor's singing harmonized by the rest of the band, brings a delicate sweet guy/bad boy wrenched heart that was last heard, all too briefly, by the late Jeff Buckley.


Grizzly Bear's music is thoughtfully arranged, focused on mood and emotion, not so much on overt hooks but on sweeps and rhythmic ushering. They are also an ensemble band, each player very much part of the song and Taylor is a subdued lead man. This approach to structure and the general melodrama of their music is not far afield from other contemporary bands like "Arcade Fire" or the layered sounds of "Animal Collective" (on Saturday's lineup), all of whom take a pass on traditional lead guitar driven rock.

Soon after the sets changed, earnestness gave way to irreverence, the opposing side of the sound of now. It was time for the busy Brazilian thing known as CSS (Cansei Ser Sexy, "tired of being sexy"). So much there right off with that title, taken from a quote from America's sweetheart Beyonce. I was not sure what I was watching, but I loved it all; the the blur of hyper-colored leotard dancers and the billowing off-the-range attire from Lovefoxx the endearing lead singer who is a possible threat to Bjork.

CSS plays music to party and dance. As Lovefoxx cries, "What's your favorite drink? Alcohol!" She sings and dances like there is nothing better and more fun than right now. Her costume, a lovely bag lady scream of fun and insanity, is just part of the funk-punk-electro-trash show that explodes from the stage. It's a stage you want smaller because you really just want to jump up and rage with these crazy Brazilians. Their music is also really good- great grooves, hilarious lyrics, and twisted pop.

Shortly following CSS was mashup hero Girl Talk, another installment to the irreverent side of the sound of now. Gregg Gillis, who with his laptop, is the sideline jester of pop now invited to the main stage. His music teaches us that you can have it all at once.

Do you like Rick Springfield, MC Hammer and Kelly Clarkson? Of course you do and Girl Talk takes the best of each, cuts and pastes- and boom! He's shelling out something entirely new, but oh so familiar.

By 8:30pm the whole festival gathered at the big stage waiting for the headliner.

When Radiohead hit the stage, the moon had risen and the aquatic and bedroom lighting drenched the stage. They took their places and proceeded to seduce the crowd. The early tone setter was "House of Cards", a deep soulful love ballad.

Radiohead's new album, "In Rainbows", continues the band's tradition of reinvention with an overall feels that is more sensual and sexy than anything we have heard from them before.
The single's first line: "I don't want to be your friend, I just want to be your lover"; this from Thom Yorke? What? But yes, and it pulses around with the atmospherics of guitarist and magician Jonny Greenwood.

Thom Yorke is slight and on occasion devastated looking as if the world around him is just too crude and boorish to bear. His appearance is a deception that feeds into his power as a singer and performer. A collection of cameras brought each band member up close and personal on two big screens. The focus on Yorke as he sings each rising note in the refrain of new songs like "Reckoner", deliver an artist completely within his work. The veins on his neck swell, his eyes are closed, York stretches out each note and syllable with unhurried elegance and precision.


Radiohead has the perception as a band aloof, perhaps overly serious and too melancholy. They do enjoy the haunt and drama of their music, but they are also having fun. During "My Iron Lung", the most conventional rock song of the night, a crowd pleaser from their earlier material, Yorke indulged himself and hammed self-mocking expressions of wrought anguish into the camera mic.

The band released "In Rainbows" earlier this year online with a pay what you want scheme. It was a bold move that reflects the changing tide of the music industry and the band's willingness to adapt and honor new ideas and the internet media landscape. Bands like Grizzly Bear, CSS, Girl Talk and the many others that will play this weekend may embody the sound of now, but 16 years after Radiohead released "Creep", the band from Oxfordshire sounds as cutting edge and fresh as ever. Judging by their excitement on stage, the band will be playing the sound of now for sometime into the future.




many thousands of us slowly waited to board ferries

Nicaragua in Seven, Part II: Granada

Granada

The San Juan river runs from Lake Nicaragua in the middle of that Central American country to the Caribbean sea 119 miles to the east. The passage makes up the central waterway of the initial and occasionally revived alternative to the Panama Canal. Despite Nicaragua's relative closer proximity to U.S ports, cash strapped France, the protector of the Panamanian route, struck a sweet heart deal in 1903 with the United States on behalf of the Panamanians, enabling a cheaper acquisition to the Pacific.

Before the canal politics of the turn of the last century, the San Juan river was well known by Spanish rivals, as the path to the colonial stronghold of silver wealth, Granada. This regal city, nicknamed the "Great Sultan" in honor of its Iberian namesake, is perched on the northwest shore of Lake Nicaragua, and when Caribbean privateering was in full swing in the 1600's, Granada was convenient for plunder for the bands of pirates cutting across from the east, most famously Sir Henry Morgan and his buccaneers.

Iglesia de Guadelupe, built originally as a fort in 1626

Morgan sacked the town in 1665 and destroyed all Spanish munitions and boats. He left shortly thereafter to return to Jamaica with his spoils and to great fame. The city was sacked two more time in the next five years by other pirates. Granada would fall again in 1856 to William Walker, an American “filibuster”, who attempted to personally colonize Nicaragua. As he and his posse were beat out of the city, one of his officers burned Granada to the ground.

Our invasion was more humble as we arrived depleted and craving a solid meal. A hunger that was satisfied with some delicious beef fillets tasting of the green grass we had passed earlier that day.

It was evening and we found the city standing proudly, humming with activity. The social heart of Granada is the beautiful Parque Central. The park was filled with strolling families, couples on benches and teenagers break-dancing inside the cupola.

These Central American hip hop stars were a more focused and subdued version of their counterparts in Union Square. The Grenadino kids danced in the dark with no radio or live musical accompaniment. Looking up into the hushed and huddled circle of Nica-punk hair, skateboards and form fit jeans, one would expect to hear the typical street bass and holler of teenage exhibitionism, but instead it was mostly the creak of the cupola wood floor and the encouraging coos of peers as a dancer rotated upside down on her head.

The Cathedral de Granada dominates the square surrounding the park. It was rebuilt since the city was burned, but it is classic Spanish colonial in its reconstruction. The building’s bright hues radiate and set the tone for much of the warm and lively facades of the city. The interior is vast, but bland and more practical than its exterior.

Cathedral de Granada, rebuilt 1915

You are hard pressed to find a homely block surrounding the park and cathedral. The streets are a procession of yellow, magenta and turquoise. A look down one of these streets reveals Volcan Mombacho looming in the distance as the tiled roofs frame your view. Suddenly a horse driven taxi crosses your path and your antique postcard of the New World is complete.


The private homes on these streets are restored and in Castilian fashion open up into courtyards filled with fruit trees and plants. When walking by I had the chance to peer inside and see the gentleman of the house reading in his rocking chair in the shade. He was comfortable, there was music playing, and it was civilized. Outside it was just us rube tourists wandering the empty mid-afternoon streets suffering under the sun.

These homes are not far from the cluster of Internet cafes and the type of tourist restaurants you pass by initially with disdain, but after 20 minutes you succumb to anyway. Granada is very much a town oriented towards tourists and a growing ex-pat community. There are many nice bars and cafes, some of which have older American men practicing their Spanish with young dates over a bottle of rum.

Our time in Granada was brief, and in fact we saw very little. What we did sense during our stay was a charming town that should be explored more to meet the people who call the “Great Sultan” home. Because we were on the express highlight tour of Nicaragua, actually getting to know these Grenadinos would have to wait - I could smell coffee descending from the mountains in the North.


Next Installment:  The Metaphysics of a 3rd World  Speed Trap and My Continued Affair with Coffee farms