Live Review: Yeasayer and MGMT @ Music Hall of Williamsburg [02/14/08]

Valentines Day. Music Hall of Williamsburg. Brooklyn, New York. Lovers everywhere. In what was touted by some news organization write-ups as the “underground show of the year,” the bands MGMT and Yeasayer, along with the guests Chairlift, joined forces to play a tour-ending, home-coming, happiness-inducing, love-making set. Despite some pre-show backlash (complaints about the insanity of craigslist prices, complaints about hype like the quote above, etc.), the show lived up to expectations. It also highlighted, through the contrast between Yeasayer and MGMT, the vexed nature of making music in these fast “times.”

To talk about MGMT, we first have to talk about their name: do you say “Em Gee Em Tee” when you say it or do you say “management” or do you nervously try to say both at the same time? Letterman and Yeasayer say it the first way, Billboard and some of my best friends say it the second way. The rest of us are stuck in that undecidable middle ground, anxiously switching it up with every new mention of the band. (You’re lucky I’m writing this and not speaking, you’d be crazy by now. Please comment below on how you say it.)

But this undecidability is telling: MGMT plays music that confuses. It is, you might say, complex post-ironical ironically unironic but unironic ironic music, or what I would like to call “uh” music. A band of the 2000’s, they play seventies rock. You can name the names if you want to: Bowie, T Rex, Pink Floyd (gracias Matthew), and more. But the point isn’t, ultimately, winning the unwinnable name game, but rather how you deal with the crazy series of questions that all this name-ableness raises while you’re listening to their technically amazing show. A possible interior monologue: “What are they saying about these decidedly un-fashionable (even in the simple ironic way) sounds? What is the status of these weird essays in musical genre (songs)? Am I supposed to laugh (with the band?) at this? Am I cheesy if I genuinely like this? Do I like this? What and why are they doing this? Yes, yes originality is dead so we can only play-act with the past, but is this the way to do it? Why is this making me feel nostalgic in a weird way? What is happening to me? Why am I uncontrollably dancing right now? Why is this song [“Electric Feel”] making me want to shake my booty like I’ve never done before?”

...At this point (thankfully) the questions break off and the body takes over where the mind couldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t go: who cares about what’s being said (implicitly or explicitly) when you can have fun, when you can dance and play and be innocent. In these moments (aplenty on Thursday) we can take them at their word: “This is a call to arms to live and love and sleep together.” The beat, the guitar crunch, the showmanship: these released us from the very trap the band sets for us.

If MGMT are “uh” music, you might say that Yeasayer are Ur-music, a rock music reduced to its essentials: breath and beat. While lots of rock music is about creating a mass of sound, often through the power of guitar, Yeasayer—especially live—create a sparse texture of sweetsour vocal harmonies and polyrhythmic extremes. There are wisps of ancient-seeming-but-not-actually-ancient musics—Celtic pentatonic repetitions, Indian raga, African drumming—but there’s also synthetic blops and bloops, magnetic but restrained bass lines, and this hard to place breezy 80’s feel (Where am I hearing that from? Help out in the comments.) But old and new, original and quoted meld in way that embodies the definition of singular. And that singular sound is danceable and emotional and deep. “2080” made me snap to attention like no song has done for me in a long while. They’ve restructured it a bit from the album version; live it comes out stark, dangerous and sad (“…In 2080/I will surely be dead/so don’t look ahead/never look ahead…”). The chorus, reduced to a few atmospheric sounds, a barely-there pulse and the sweet-and-scary-but-smooth-and-spot-on falsetto harmonies, hit me over the head with an elegance and poignancy that made me go crazy for more.

In saying that breath and beat are the essentials for Yeasayer, I do not want you to think that the texture was brittle or thin. Quite the opposite. For instance, the song “Wait for the Wintertime” provided a guitar heavy end to the set, and Anand Wilder’s apocalyptic riff work filled the room with a driving anxiety. Whether or not guitars were involved, the band live seemed to be able to bridge every gap: to be noise/melody, pain/pleasure, dance/stillness all at the same time. Perhaps the best visual analogy for this bridging is lead singer Chris Keating, whose contortions while jumping, fidgeting, and cymbal-slamming (not to mention the tensed tyrannosaurus rex arms he makes when really pushing out of himself) made us all see how difficult it is to escape from our skin and this world. He was incredibly affecting: I wanted to sing and sing, even when I didn’t know the lyrics. It was a uniquely ecstastic set. It was an unquestionable expression of musical art that, appropriately enough for Valentine’s Day, I fell in love with.

[Words by John Melillo]
[Photo by Sarah Jewell]