Alex G plays Brooklyn Steel (Cat Z responds!) + The Smile play Kings Theatre
Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead seem liberated by their collaboration with Sons of Kemet's Tom Skinner
Now that “professional contacts” follow me on Twitter, I try not to drink and tweet, because I know I’ll end up posting some absurdly career-limiting joke about how, like, Alex G’s music makes me want to join the Taliban, or something, and then spiral and start checking how many “impressions” the tweet got before I wised up and deleted it, and wondering if one of the 14 people who saw it was Pitchfork’s reviews editor, or whatever. So it’s crucial that on the occasion that I’m at a show, and I’ve chosen to be zooted that night, that I have friends to whom I can text my reactions. One of those friends is Cat, whom I mentioned anonymously in my Alex G post. She also saw an Alex G Brooklyn Steel show, but on a different day, and responded here with her own take:
Alex G plays Brooklyn Steel
by Cat Z
While watching Alex G perform his last sold-out show at Brooklyn Steel two Saturdays ago, I had an awful thought: can men be … good? All the evidence suggests the contrary. They barrel into you at DJ sets while trying to meet up with their homies, and before you can push them back to where they came from, they fart. They’re such simpletons that you need to teach them how to peel an onion, and then that there’s a point at which you stop peeling. They repost Bladee songs without any regard for cringe, they say the weirdest shit on the internet, they insist on inviting you to the bar to “catch up” and then drown you out completely with unsolicited monologues about Donda 2. If they’re my dad, they harbor unexplainable grudges against people based on the geopolitical conflicts between their home countries post-WWII.
But there is a specific breed of man who is comforting for precisely the reasons that the others drive you wild—his obliviousness, his inability to fully account for his own emotions, his crazy lack of drip. So there was Alex G on stage, butting stupidly into his guitarist as they ran in circles, wearing an oversized white shirt he almost certainly got at Uniqlo, his hair shaggy and long. He’s almost 30, but he looks like his mom still dresses him, or maybe it’s because his mom retired from dressing him that he looks like that—the way dudes will make grilled cheese for every meal because they can barely turn on the stove. Alex G is goofy. He’s a famous person who’s gone viral for having a beer stain on his pants that looks like pee, who has to insist that his songs are not all about dogs, who concedes openly: “I work pretty hard on the music and I don’t work very hard on my personality.” I look at him and just know he can’t do long division for shit.
Part of the charm of guys like this is that they’re so foolish and seemingly un-reflexive that it’s impossible to be anxious around them. (Would you be anxious around someone whose pre-encore song is “Life is a Highway?”). I can think of several characters like this. My college friend Jared, who threw a completely unsanctioned Kentucky Derby-themed party with his pals on the lawn of one of the dean’s offices, and secured two unwilling baby goats to race in lieu of horses, to the delight of his hat-wearing guests. The guy in Philly eating his 40th rotisserie chicken. The Swedish men gleefully falling into a bog, posted on Twitter under the caption “dudes can have literally fun under any circumstance.” (My roommate shared this with me, giggling.)
Like Adlan, I also like the line “they hit you with the rolled up magazine.” That second verse of “Runner” captures the generosity of the doofus, whose hijinks dissolve the weariness of the people around him, making things easy for a while. It’s true that, stereotypically, one of the worst qualities of men is that they are juvenile, but then again, it’s also fun to regress to a more youthful state, to be uninhibited and silly. The difference between the annoying men and the good ones is whether they make their juvenility your burden, something you’re required to clean up after, or whether they bring you along into their childlike world.
In the case of the latter camp, they’re often not thinking too hard about what they’re doing or saying, so there’s an honesty to their actions that encourages honesty within yourself. The eponymous “runner” in “Runner” is portrayed as someone who is easy to reveal oneself to: How can a man judge you when he’s so nonsensical? Don’t you relax a little, feel better, in his orbit?
I should say that I haven’t listened to Alex G deeply beyond the current album, God Save the Animals, so maybe I’m overstating his own projected dopiness. But “honesty” is a word that comes up regularly when I talk to other people about his appeal, which even his biggest fans seem to have a hard time grasping. (“I don’t know how to convince anyone about Alex G, he just … is …,” one of my music journalist coworkers said to me. ) I think a lot of it has to do with the simplicity of his language, how it seems to strip life down to its barest essence. Fundamentally, a song like “Ain’t It Easy” is about the dream of feeling held and secure, a human need that dates back to infancy: “Now you sit with me, I keep you safe/And you listen to me everyday.” Especially for people like me, who are in the business of overanalyzing, there can be something too slick and deceptive about precise articulations. I could give a thousand words for how I feel, but I imagine that they’d pale against “I love you” or “I need you” — or “I take care of you” from “Cross the Sea,” with its universe of meaning.
My favorite line in God Save the Animals is not in “Runner” but in “Miracles,” when Alex G is responding to his partner’s desire to have a baby one day. He doesn’t say much; I’m struggling, he lets out. And then as if bowled over by an emotion he can’t help, he changes his mind. He doesn’t talk about the adult things, the health insurance costs of raising a kid, the fundamental stress it’ll have on their relationship. He seems to be dumbfounded, grasping at the only thing he knows: “God help me, I love you, I agree.”
The Smile play Kings Theatre
All I ever heard about Thom Yorke on stage was how much he hates it, how reluctant he is to occupy the spotlight, an introvert cursed by his genius to be on parade. After seeing The Smile play Kings Theatre on Friday, I realize that couldn’t be more wrong. The guy’s a total ham. Beside Tom Skinner, the British jazz drummer formerly of futurist group Sons of Kemet, Yorke and fellow Radiohead auteur Johnny Greenwood seemed totally liberated. “We performed this song on Fallon last night, after Martha Stewart,” Yorke said to introduce “You Will Never Work In Television Again,” the single from the supergroup’s debut album A Light For Attracting Attention. “Figure that out!” It was the kind of giddily delivered joke from a guy clearly having a blast on the Kings Theatre stage.
Each of the three members of The Smile was nested in his own battle station of instruments and amplifiers; joined for most of the latter half of the set by avant garde jazz saxophonist Robert Stillman, who was also the show’s opener, they seemed utterly at home. Skinner and Greenwood would go off on a groove–The Smile is built, fundamentally, on groove–and on the occasional moment when Yorke himself wasn’t playing bass, or guitar, or piano, or the Rhodes that was being wheeled around the stage between him and Johnny, he would just start dancing, as if Kings Theatre, in all its gaudy Jazz Age Rococo splendor, were his living room. Johnny was doing a little shuffle himself, don’t think I didn’t catch that, all the while bowing his bass and extracting other keening sounds out of his tools. Inspiration pulsed from the stage–even as the band played all of A Light For Attracting Attention, they added no fewer than half a dozen new songs they’ve been writing on the road. “We’ve only got one album,” Yorke wise-cracked. They all sound great, and I think he knows it.
Other Stuff
For reasons that would be an overshare, this is absolutely a reassertion of my commitment to the blog! Critical Partying is back.
Follow me on Twitter obviously:
