CARLY CARIOLI

High School Musical 3: Senior Year

CARLY CARIOLI — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:16:43 GMT

Little more than an infomercial for the soundtracks
Although Senior Year makes the most of its big-screen debut by increasing the body counts in its group-choreography numbers, it’s a smaller movie than its chart-topping, direct-to-cable predecessors.

The preferred method for consuming an episode of Disney’s revolutionary High School Musical franchise is to watch the debut on television while DVR-ing it, and then watch it again, and again . . . and again. So don’t ask me for the final verdict on HSM3 just yet – I’ll let you know how it holds up after I’ve been force-marched through its glittery production numbers a few dozen times. Multiply that dynamic by a viewing audience of several million teenagers and you’ve got one of the reasons HSM3 seems destined to have less of a cultural impact than its straight-to-cable predecessors — at least until the inevitable karaoke bonus edition DVD hits shelves. (Then again, HSM3 took in $42 million in opening-weekend receipts – maybe the audience’s watch/rinse/repeat viewing pattern is paying off at the box office.)

While Senior Year makes the most of its big-screen debut by increasing the body counts in its group-choreography numbers, it’s a smaller movie. For shits and giggles, I watched HSM3 the way its intended audience will – and I’m pleased to report the plot lines are so predictable that text-messaging furiously between songs will not prevent you from following them. The hero of this third installment is, oddly, not its star – the Travolta-like pinup Zac Efron as working-class b-ball captain Troy Bolton. As HSM3 opens, the West Side Story-book romance between Troy and Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens) fizzles as an inevitable college dispersal looms (or maybe Vanessa’s still pissed about those naked photos on the Internet) and so center stage is ceded to the fight among the cast for a competitive scholarship to Julliard. What transpires is cleverer than what Disney’s chaff-of-late-capitalism machine is generally given credit for. The HSM franchise likes to frame East High’s class struggles in bubblegum-Marxist terms, and Senior Year is no exception: there’s Gabriella, alienated from her artistic talents and tractor-beamed towards the corporate path mapped out by her petit-bourgeouise mother; the proletarian student composer Kelsi (Olesya Rulin), who turns this year’s East High spring musicale into a celebration of social realism; and spoiled rich-bitch Sharpay Evans (Ashley Tisdale), the trilogy’s obligatory Disney villain, undone by greed, privilege, and powerlust. As the Star Wars trilogy was eventually revealed to be a story about the redemption of Darth Vader, so does HSM3 reveal the trilogy as an arc about the redemption of Sharpay’s flamboyant, showtune-loving brother and former partner-in-crime Ryan (Lukas Grabeel). Marionetting Troy and Gabriella through their moves as HSM3’s musical-within-a-musical takes shape, Ryan becomes a barely-veiled stand-in for director/choreographer Kenny Ortega (whose storied career includes Madonna’s “Material Girl” video in the 1980s, and arguable surpassed HSM itself with Miley Cyrus’s record-breaking “Best of Both Worlds” concert/film last year). It’s only when the characters are removed from their Hollywood soundstages and thrust into East High’s auditorium – with revolving-door set changes that double as a blueprint for the inevitable high-school productions and ice-capade tours to follow – that Senior Year hits Ortega’s high notes of collaborative egalitarianism.

Mangum's opus

CARLY CARIOLI — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:32:49 GMT

Neutral Milk Hotel's epic Aeroplane
This article originally appeared in the March 5, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the March 5, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

If it's difficult to sum up the exquisite sonic splendor of Neutral Milk Hotel's second album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea (Merge), it's even more difficult to convey this CD's fascinating, elliptical spiritualism. Shaded with cryptic allegory, illuminated by a patchwork faith that embraces Jesus Christ, angels, flying Victrolas, and reincarnation as just a few of its icons and tenets, it dwells in a twilight of rambunctious souls, secret songs, and bright, bubbly, terrible scenes. And it heralds the arrival of a formidable new voice in popular music.

That voice belongs to the band's 26-year-old singer, songwriter, and only permanent member: Jeff Mangum. He grew up in a deeply religious family in rural Louisiana, though he makes it clear, over the phone from Athens, Georgia, that "I wasn't brought up, like, Southern Baptist burn-in-Hell. I was brought up, like, weird sorta psychedelic Christianity." And he wrote most of the first Neutral Milk Hotel album, On Avery Island (Merge, 1995), with an acoustic guitar and a mere handful of chords while living in the closets and on the floors of friends, composing for these friends wild, hymnlike, heart-wrenching songs to soothe their troubles. The songs of In the Aeroplane, like those of On Avery Island, get fleshed out until they buzz like a cross between a folkie in the midst of a caffeine-overdose seizure (Neutral Milk Hotel have been known to call it "fuzz folk," though if they weren't playing acoustic guitars it would almost certainly sound like punk) and a tripped-out high-school marching band outfitted with a thrift shop's worth of obscure instruments from accordion to zanzithophone. Yet on the album's centerpieces, the boundless seven-minute epic "Oh, Comely" and "Two-Headed Boy," Mangum virtually redefines the emotional possibilities for one man and an acoustic.

Mangum can be pretty opaque when he wants. His trademark is an unrelenting lyricism -- long, dazzling arcs of gilded melodies and run-on sentences that keep unfolding in alliterative twists and jackknife turns, sometimes so free-associative, they sound as if they had been created out of thin air as a spontaneous dada-ist soliloquy. He spins tales the way Jimi Hendrix played guitar -- burning words and phrases rolling out in a strange technicolor beauty that keeps blooming long after the images he's describing have ceased to make any rational sense. In the Aeroplane opens with the following: "When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers/And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees/In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your knees." Bizarre, surreal -- but vivid.

Thanks for nothing, Thom

CARLY CARIOLI — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:01:15 GMT

Radiohead rant
Thanks for deciding to fuck the music industry in all three holes by giving away your new album, In Rainbows, for free on the Internet.

Dear Dudes,

Thanks for deciding to fuck the music industry in all three holes by giving away your new album, In Rainbows, for free on the Internet. We appreciate your generosity in allowing us to pay however much we feel like when we download your DRM-free mp3s. This is a bold and brilliant idea, and we can’t think of a band we’d rather see come up with it.

Just one problem: it’s a fucking scam. You tossers.

Once we read the fine print, it became apparent that your “pay what you will” philosophy was just a smokescreen for a marketing plan that owes far more to conservative, old-world distribution plans than the blogosphere realizes.

What’s actually happening? As of October 10, In Rainbows will be released in two packages. The free-download version (or, we should say, the e-mail-us-a-few-bucks-if-you-want version) contains 10 songs, no extraneous packaging or information, all Spartan and Fugazi-like. The deluxxx model is an $80 box set that adds a double LP, the CD version of the album, a bonus disc of additional tunes, and an original, signed copy of the Magna Carta. At some point in the indeterminate future, InRainbows will be released in something approximating traditional CD form. By someone, somewhere. You might even be able to buy it in a store.

With one fell swoop, you’ve solved the blood-from-a-stone riddle that’s been plaguing the music industry since Napster: to wit, how do you get people to pay for free music? “Give it away” might seem a strange answer, unless you’ve been breathing for the past seven years. Everyone was going to download In Rainbows for free anyway, so you might as well do it yourself and pass the hat while you’re at it.

So, sure, “giving the album away for free” is genius PR — thinking waaaay outside the box. If someone’s keeping a doomsday clock for the CD as a viable medium, please reset it an hour closer to midnight.

The amazing part about your plan, Mssrs. Radiohead, is that if fans want the “object” — the physical manifestation of the music — you, Radiohead, are willing to gouge people for far more than the traditional record industry would ever dream of doing. I mean, I was pretty pissed when I had to pay $19 for a Madonna record. But I’ll blow David Geffen before I pay $80 for a Radiohead album. And before you Radiohead fans start typing, “Hey asshole, they’re giving the album away for free, remember?” well, last time I checked, “Down Is the New Up” is on only the fucking bonus disc. And I love “Down Is the New Up.”

R.I.P., Mr. Butch

CARLY CARIOLI — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 13:38:24 GMT

Folk hero, "King of Kenmore Square," dead in scooter crash

The Jesus Lizard

CARLY CARIOLI — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:39:48 GMT

Live | MVD
Yep, this is about how we remember it.

Nirvana revisited

CARLY CARIOLI — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 21:17:30 GMT

A new Nirvana biography and excerpts from the Phoenix archives shed new light
True’s book coincides with a bit of Nirvana’s Phoenix lore, and this week we’re publishing an excerpt from the book alongside several related articles from our archives.

The title of Everett True’s new Nirvana: The Biography (DaCapo) is slightly deceptive: there have been countless biographies of Nirvana, at least two of them definitive, and True – the wildcat English journo who is about the closest thing to a Lester Bangs as grunge ever produced – would be the first to admit that trad biography isn’t his bag. Better to think of his 500-plus-page opus as an oral history, in which the strongest voice is often True’s own – after all, as he never tires of reminding us, He Was There. Lurking inside his version of the oft-told Nirvana tale is a story as wily as Please Kill Me.

One of the countless episodes related in True’s book coincides with a bit of Nirvana’s Phoenix lore, and this week we’re publishing an excerpt from the book alongside several related articles from our archives. “Mary Lou Lord has been almost written out of the Kurt Cobain story,” True writes, attributing that fact to an ongoing campaign by Courtney Love to discredit the relationship Kurt had with Lord back in 1991, just as Nevermind was breaking. Click here to read True’s account.

In the book, True also publishes a long and thoughtful reminiscence written recently by Mary Lou. Back in the spring of 1993, the Phoenix’s Brett Milano profiled Lord on the occasion of her Real , an album-length tape on the cassette label Deep Music . It wasn’t exactly a secret then that she’d been involved with Cobain – it was even mentioned in a record-company bio that was circulated at the time – but this was one of the first times she spoke openly about the relationship. Several months later, a Phoenix receptionist was surprised to get a phone call from an apparently intoxicated Courtney Love. Shortly thereafter, we received two cryptic faxes that appeared to have been scrawled in Courtney’s handwriting and were signed by Kurt. (A publicist for the pair confirmed their authenticity – and also mentioned that the publicist had begged them not to send the faxes.) Click here to read the faxes, which include a clue about who “Rape Me” was written for, as well as a haunting coda from Kurt that eerily foreshadowed his suicide.

The tao of fun

CARLY CARIOLI — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 01:53:55 GMT

VIDEO: Andrew WK at Harpers Ferry, February 20, 2007
In this exclusive video interview with the Boston Phoenix, Andrew WK discusses his motivational speaking, his next musical direction, and his emerging philosophy of life. Plus, exclusive footage of his recent solo, DJ, and speaking performances in Boston and New York.

Mooninites cripple Boston

CARLY CARIOLI — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:48:29 GMT

And rock your face off
Boston, 2007 = Grovers Mill, 1938 Slop Culture: In case you don't know who the Mooninites are Media Log: The road not taken

Craig's list

CARLY CARIOLI — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:33:58 GMT

Sara Evans’ husband joins the list of the Republicans’ strange bedfellows
This week, Sara Evans dropped out of the top-rated Dancing with the Stars , alleging that her soon-to-be-ex husband is a pervy, porn-hording adulterer. Somewhere, White House flacks may have felt they dodged a bullet.

Evans, President Bush, and Schelske

Republicans suffer from a dearth of high-profile celebrity allies, but country star Sara Evans was an exception: an award-winning Nashville star and mother of three, she was a frequent entertainer at rallies for George W. Bush, and her husband, Craig L. Schelske, became an activist in GOP politics. “Evans sees a natural crossover between country tunes and Republican politics,” the Portland Oregonian wrote in 2002. “Like any country star worth her rhinestones, she sings about daddies and mommas, truck stops and broken hearts,” but in accordance with her Christian faith, “she [will not] write nor sing songs about adultery.” Before Evans’ exit this week from the network celeb talent contest Dancing with the Stars, a straight-faced Tom DeLay urged Republicans to vote for Evans in her dance-off against fellow contestant Jerry Springer: “We need to send a message to Hollywood and the media that smut has no place on television by supporting good people like Sara Evans.”

This week, Evans dropped out of the top-rated twinkle-toed dog and pony show, alleging that her soon-to-be-ex husband is a pervy, porn-hording adulterer. Somewhere, White House flacks may have felt they dodged a bullet: in 2002, Schelske was a White House-backed candidate for a House seat. But for the good sense of Republican voters in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, who failed to elect him, Schelske could have been a Bush-anointed Congressman — and the Republicans’ right wing could have had another “family values” scandal on its hands.

As it is, the White House can’t be too stoked. Schelske was a Steering Committee Member for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, and kept his hand in national GOP politics via his Craig PAC, which has been raising money to support Republican candidates in 2006, and to “assist the Republican Party in promoting common-sense, conservative policies to guide elected officials.” But now that Evans’ divorce filing is public, tabloid readers are likely wondering about the disconnect between Craig PAC and what Evans’ court filing calls “Craigs Lists.”

Sexy's back

CARLY CARIOLI — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:23:06 GMT

Justin Timberlake, Avalon, August 26, 2006
Club gigs by superstars are inherently contrived, exclusionary, economically unsustainable. They also feel more human because they are more human. Duh.

The once-in-a-lifetime club tour is always a good look: 2000 ticketholders here or there isn’t going to hurt your arena draw six months down the line, corporate sponsors are more than happy to underwrite the tour bus, the star gets to “reconnect” with “the fans,” and press hacks like yours truly get to write leads about how deep down, behind all the glaciers of hype and the tundras of cash, there’s a dude who just wants to lead a real band, man. And what’s more -- to the chagrin of people who would like pop to behave strictly as cynical illusion, like the hegemonic evil empire to their grassroots rebel alliance -- it almost always works. What makes pop disappointing and cancerous is not so much the nature but the scale of the enterprise: phsyical distance, sheer numbers, the demands placed on art in the age of infinite digital reproduction. Sure, club gigs by superstars are inherently contrived, exclusionary, economically unsustainable. They also feel more human because they are more human. Duh.

So yes, Virginia, Justin Timberlake’s show at Avalon on Saturday night was everything you’d want from your stadium-star-in-the-club gig: reasonably intimate, loosely choreographed, light on the sales pitch. Even those of us who’ll never forgive Justin for throwing Janet under the bus are having a hard time denying dude the fast lane to critical adoration. Granted, this comes from the mouth of someone who paid $2.99 for the “Sexy Back” ringtone even though he could’ve had Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” for free, who is a certified member of the “Atlanctic Records, T.I. Clearance” internerd fan club, and who’s already sold on his forthcoming Futuresex/Lovesounds (Jive, officially out September 12, helpfully leaked on the web Friday afternoon). Unlike most of you, I didn’t need to be convinced. If you did, you wouldn’t have been there.

Bikers shoot Bang Camaro

CARLY CARIOLI — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 21:06:53 GMT

Yes, we have a supergroup
“I can’t believe we didn’t have a flying V when we started this band,” said Bang Camaro drummer Andy Dole, staring at the Middle East stage at the ungodly early hour of 10 am this past Saturday.

Gnarls Barkley: Rebirth of soul

CARLY CARIOLI — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:47:11 GMT

Gnarls Barkley at Avalon, August 12, 2006
I’m probably not the only one who went to the Gnarls Barkly show Friday night at Avalon wondering if the costumes would be the most interesting part. Slideshow: Gnarls Barkley at Avalon, August 11, 2006

Tuned out

CARLY CARIOLI — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:07:19 GMT

A guide to surviving High School Musical
Disney’s tweenpop smash is now the fastest selling TV movie on DVD, ever. Here’s five reasons not to hate the most disgusting show on television.

Zac Efron and Vanessa Anne Hudgens

One definition of feeling old is that sensation you get when the #1 album on the Billboard 200 is the soundtrack to a TV movie you never heard of. And so the response of most college-aged adults to High School Musical — which is regularly the most watched movie on cable whenever Disney decdes to re-run it, and has spawned a cast album that has topped the charts not once but twice — was to scowl and wonder aloud how their younger siblings’ generation has suddenly taken over the universe.

It’s been a generation — or at least an administration — since the Disney Channel cancelled its New Mickey Mouse Club, thereby creating the most profitable unemployment line in entertainment history: the one that included Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and, of course, the future Mrs. Federline. That cast became so famous that it’s easy to forget they were all once unknowns. Disney’s dream factory may have gone dormant for a few years, during which period American Idol cornered the amateur-singer market and Kidz Bop undercut playskool-friendly Top-40 by recycling adult hits as G-rated pop. But High School Musical is a reminder of what Disney still does best. It’s a breakout vehicle for teen talents whose biggest Google results are imdb entries for The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

Anyone who cares about pop culture would do well to examine HSM for clues to the immediate future of music and television: some 24 million discrete viewers watched the movie before its home-video release last week; soundtrack sales have eclipsed 2 million, and the DVD sold over 400,000 copies in its first day of release. That’s right: 400,000 in a fucking day, dude. Its single, “Breaking Free,” topped the download charts even though Disney gave the song away as a promotional mp3; likewise, DVD sales do not appear to have been hindered by Disney’s decision to release the movie early as a digital download on iTunes. A High School Musical sequel is in the works, as is a Broadway adaptation, and actual high schools are clamoirng for the sheet music so they can put on their own productions. The young-adult novelization is zipping up the Times bestseller list. Once again, young minds have chosen safe, low-budget, formulaic entertainment over older, smarter, more cynical options — as well they should, because that’s what kids are supposed to do, dammit. Adults can take heart in recalling how that tendency has been exploited and celebrated by great songwriters from the Brill Building’s denizens up through Max Martin and Linda Perry. A Pulitzer-winning creation HSM isn’t, but if you think grown-ups aren’t watching, you’re crazy. Twenty minutes of Googling have failed to reveal the songsmiths behind “What I’ve Been Looking For” and “Breaking Free,” but if anyone knows where to find them, please give them Liz Phair’s phone number.

Religion and shit

CARLY CARIOLI — Wed, 31 May 2006 16:18:30 GMT

Download new tracks Greg Graffin, the Clipse, and Shit Robot
If punk is really just folk music, maaaan , then how come so many punks insist on getting back to roots-rock in their old age?

'Urge' overkill

CARLY CARIOLI — Wed, 31 May 2006 12:13:19 GMT

Microsoft and MTV deliver too much of a bad thing
Windows Media files may be the 8-track-tapes of the digital-music universe, but Urge figures 13-year-olds will suck it up to get their mitts on exclusive TRL outtakes and AFI playlists.

The Urge's interface

There are a plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Urge, the new digital music service from MTV Networks and Windows Media that is, by default, Microsoft’s answer to iTunes. Reasons one through five: you can’t play their songs on your iPod, you can’t play their songs on your iPod, you can’t play their songs on your iPod, you can’t play their songs on your iPod, and — what’s that again? Oh, right — you can’t play their songs on your iPod.

One week in, the concensus opinion seems to be — to quote one IT blogger — “who cares?” Betting against the iPod is dumb, and betting on a subscription model isn’t much smarter. (Like Napster and Real Media’s Rhapsody, Urge charges you a monthly fee of $9 to $15 for the privelege of streaming its catalogue, then piles on another 99 cents per song if you want to burn a track to disc.) But these are not stupid people. By branding Urge in conjunction with MTV’s cable empire — including VH1 and CMT — Microsoft is hoping that unique content will trump reduced usability, and that the music networks’ captive audiences will play along.

In other words, Windows Media files may be the 8-track-tapes of the digital-music universe, but Urge figures 13-year-olds will suck up the format in order to get their mitts on exclusive TRL outtakes and AFI playlists. (Never discount the value of a good celebrity recommendation: thanks to AFI’s Urge playlist, there are now possibly several dozen goth-punks who have now heard of E-40 and Keak da Sneak.) And, of course, the site grants the networks their long-held dream of being able to capitalize on the impulse-buy retail demand stirred up by their television brands, from VH1’s “Rock Honors” and CMT’s “Outlaws Live” — both of which have their own downloadable soundtracks on Urge — to VH1’s “Best Week Ever” and “I Love the ’80s,” which have their own Urge-hosted streaming radio stations.

Mission statements

CARLY CARIOLI — Wed, 24 May 2006 23:18:37 GMT

Brazilian funk, Missy Elliott, and other things you wouldn’t expect to find in Mission of Burma’s record crates
You can tell a lot by a man’s record collection, and even more by his DJ set. And if not? Well, you still got to hear the new Burma record The Obliterati at the Enormous Room.

Mission of Burma

You can tell a lot, the thinking goes, by a man’s record collection, and even more by a man’s DJ set. And if not? Well, you still got to hear the new Mission of Burma record The Obliterati (Matador, due May 23) the other night at the Enormous Room in Cambridge, where Burma took over the turntables for a night. Their manager, Mark Kates, brought two iPods. Roger Miller brought a small CD case, with his 12-song playlist meticulously typed out on a sheet of paper. Peter Prescott brought a backpack stocked with a crate’s worth of vinyl, and kept pulling out albums that he didn’t play (James Last’s Voodoo Party, green-vinyl bootleg of radio spots by ’70s rock bands, a collection of Frances Lai’s soundtrack music), just to show people the sleeves. Clint Conley stayed home.

Kates, who despite his rock and roll credentials maintains a torrid affair with dance music under the name DJ Carbo, alternated songs from The Obliterati with his own wide-ranging selections: Burma tune, Dresden Dolls tune, Burma tune, techno tune. Asked for the provenance of a particularly un-Burma-like thump, he shrugged and scrolled through his iPod playlist. “I’m not a huge fan of house music, but the vocals are amazing. You can’t hear them right now, but this song’s great.”

If you’d got a sneak peak at the Burma documentary Not a Photograph: The Mission of Burma Story (a brief trailer for which screened in a continuous loop underneat the music), you would have recognized several longtime Burma characters in the flesh. Rick Harte, who was instrumental in producing, picking, and releasing Burma recordings -- from the group’s first single “Academy Fight Song,” to their comeback album, OnOffOn -- huddled with Miller and Kates to strategize about the pair of unreleased Burma songs he recently unearthed on an old tape reel. As Kates played the new Prescott-penned “Let Yourself Go,” Eric Van, the Red Sox statistician who is only marginally less well known as the world’s biggest Burma superfan, came running back to the DJ booth. “Roger, what time is this in?,” he asked. “Six,” Miller said, shaking his head, as if it were just an approximation. “Four. Even Peter didn’t know what it is. He showed us the riff, we could not figure it out. He would try to play it on guitar to me and Clint, and we’d think we had it, but then -- no. So we said, ‘Show it to us on the drums,’ and as soon as we heard where the kick drum falls, we got it. I told him, ‘Oh, it’s in two different times,’ and Peter looked at me very surprised and said, ‘It is?’”

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey

CARLY CARIOLI — Wed, 10 May 2006 22:09:19 GMT

Infomercial for metal that's less informative than MTV
Sam Dunn — first-time filmmaker, lifelong headbanger, sociologist, Canadian — opens his documentary with a silly question: why isn’t heavy metal taken seriously?

The Strokes

CARLY CARIOLI — Mon, 01 May 2006 22:32:07 GMT

Second Impressions
I didn’t love the new stuff.

TEXTURE AND TONE: It's all about the grain of Julian's voice

I didn’tlove the new stuff — except for “You Only Live Once,” which is like the Pretenders on cocaine and restraining orders, and “Ask Me Anything,” performed with just mellotron accompaniment and reminding me of Simple Minds and the Magnetic Fields. But I didn’t mind it either, since they got most of it out of the way up front a week ago Tuesday at Agganis Arena. On second listen, I decided First Impressions is made for these bigger spaces.

Julian, newly sober (no one on stage had so much as a cigarette all night), looked as if he’d poached his wardrobe from my high-school closet circa ’87: tucked-in T-shirt, ill-fitting leather jacket, tight black Wrangler jeans, between-haircuts mop, puffy hightop Reeboks tied too tight. Mood: a gangly hesher yanked fresh from some pressing street hassle and plunked on stage. Students of metal might have discerned flashes of Thin Lizzy (“Red Light”) and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” (“The End Has No End”), as guitars feinted toward heavy with ominous triads and Blue Öyster Cultish pentatonics before withdrawing to more anthemic territory. Supersized ’70s LEDs flanked the stage and the drum riser, flashing mixing-board red and Tron blue and traffic-light green and pulsing squad-car blue/red/white. The Strokes were as loud as the lights, louder. They made girls dance. For “Under Control,” which may be their best song ever, Har Mar Superstar, a/k/a Sean Na Na, returned from his opening slot for an impromptu, second-time-ever duet. He and Julian ended up together on the floor, trading the line “I don’t want to do it your way,” Har Mar singing it an octave higher, with Julian’s crotch in his face. Beautiful.

So yeah, didn’t mind the new stuff, mostly because of Julian. The Strokes’ songs are palatable so long as they retain their texture and tone: it’s all about the grain of his voice, and how the overtone of grit overcomes and conquers the note, as if he were a grindcore singer. And what links the old and the new, which sound nothing alike, is that huge, insatiable, never-ending longing — suspension-bridge longing.

Death Cab for Cutie and Franz Ferdinand

CARLY CARIOLI — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 03:39:21 GMT

Nothing in common
Refugees from the heady indie explosion of 2003, Franz and Death Cab are currently sharing space on a concert poster featuring an emo-like Band-Aid heart and a MySpace logo.