#adlan jackson

It was kind of rude for no one to have warned me that the Beabadoobee audience is so young. Although I knew she and her band are Gen Z, I had always thought of Beatrice Laus’ English pop-rock project as being in conversation with the Snail Mails or the Soccer Mommys of the world, sad pop for millennials (we need it). But no, most in the crowd at Webster Hall on Thursday night were Zoomers themselves, and these young people came ready to go bonkers, even moshing multiple times to Beabadoobee’s sweet guitar pop. And I really must be getting old now, because when everyone started losing their shit to “She Plays Bass,” I quickly went from feeling their thrill along with them to thinking, “Haha, yeah have fun, but everyone be careful.”

But Beabadoobee and crew are highly professional. Although they have only been around for a few years, they’re already a fully staffed operation, immaculately dressed with their ’90s garb courtesy of a team that includes stylists Molly Hayward and Patricia Varillo, who also styles Laus’ mentor, the 1975’s Matty Healy. And they already have techs handling their onstage guitar handoffs. Speaking of guitars, I don't know what British peat moss Laus found her fresh-faced bandmates under and how they already have such formidable chops, but lead guitarist Jacob Bugden, bassist Eliana Sewell and drummer Luca Caruso were in peak form last night.

Just before Laus came out on her own to perform TikTok hit “Coffee,” from 2017, openers and fellow Healy acolytes Blackstarkids and Christian Leave joined Beabadoobee for a sing-along of “Last Day on Earth,” from last year’s Our Extended Play, to close out the pre-encore set as the audience bopped, raged and swooned, reminding the chronic-back-pain contingent of Thursday night’s crowd what passion for performance looks like. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ

(Beabadoobie play the Royale in Boston tonight.)

The YouTube algorithm is a kingmaker and it has treated few indie pop bands better than Montreal’s Men I Trust. One of a handful of Quebecois chill-pop exports, Men I Trust distinguish themselves from the pack by leading with plucked bass, a warm and a groovy texture delivered by Cedric Martel, and a jazz-school-meets-art-school approach to lead guitar, courtesy of Jessy Caron. It’s cozy music, and onstage at Brooklyn Steel on Tuesday night, lead singer Emma Proulx strapped her candy-red Stratocaster over a floor-length trench coat, explaining, “I’m always cold.”

And that strat jangled, yes, but despite their genre’s summery tendencies, last night Men I Trust sounded more like music for the coming winter. Keyboardist Dragos Chiriac’s synths yawned, sure, but the band also played with deeper, groaning textures that sounded less chill and more like the soundtrack to a thriller soaked in drama. And how many other indie bands would dare attempt a four-minute-long guitar solo like Caron’s on Tuesday? That’s an indulgence meant for a northeastern winter if ever I heard one—it’s not like you have anywhere else to be.

Yasiin Bey Celebrates Album Milestone at Brooklyn Steel on Sunday Night

Yasiin Bey – Brooklyn Steel – November 3, 2019 

“I know, I know. Imagine how it feels for me!” The Yasiin Bey show is a variety show. People, onstage, are always more like mirages, blurry around the edges, amplified and echoing, closer to pure energy than living flesh. This is especially true of Yasiin Bey, who, if you’re expecting to simply take the stage and rap for 90 minutes, will leave you befuddled. Luckily, we all know better: Onstage, Bey is a fireball, a scoundrel, bored and yet never less than fully engaged. We in the audience could barely keep up. The Yasiin Bey show could have been directed by David Lynch, with its sense that at any moment, anything could happen. Bey could do anything, could be thinking anything. He cracked himself up almost constantly (“Shout out the hot sauce, I like when it makes me feel like my teeth are moving. When they’re not moving”), pausing for extended dance breaks during most of which Bey would simply twirl in place, doing several pirouettes with his arms outstretched like helicopter blades, threatening to really take off into the air and leave Brooklyn Steel a mere memory on Sunday. Black on Both Sides’ 20-year anniversary was being celebrated at Brooklyn Steel last night. It’s an album full of the same mercurial, miscreant, sage-like energy. As Bey performed in front of a projection of a documentary on NYC youth gangs of the 1970s, 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s, the air was thick with the truth that the Brooklyn rapped about on Black on Both Sides, back when he still went by Mos Def, was not the same Brooklyn Yasiin Bey was standing in on Sunday. One remembers though, as Bey quipped about inside jokes between his right and left brain, and introduced himself as “Yasiin Dante Terrell Smith Bey, local talent,” that the album is similarly interior, the kaleidoscopic portrait of a constantly ticking mind. Yet it’s meant enough to so many that its celebration packed Brooklyn Steel to the exits for a night of the Yasiin Bey show, which could be anywhere, anything, at any time. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ

Photos courtesy of DeShaun Craddock | dac.photography

Flying Lotus Takes a Sold-Out Brooklyn Mirage on a Wild Ride

Flying Lotus – Brooklyn Mirage – August 30, 2019

So, Flying Lotus is science fiction. Remember that scene from Interstellar where David Gyasi’s character explains to Matthew McConaughey’s how wormholes work by folding a piece of paper and poking through it with a pen? Flying Lotus is like that—impossible numbers of places and things smashed together, everywhere at once and always in transit. It’s so many genres it could be called antigenre: funk, electronica, contemporary classical, West Coast hip-hop. It’s an Octavia Butler story, a refraction of black musical traditions that reveals their surrealism. In Flying Lotus’s music, here we are, the first cosmonauts, the alien abductees, the telepaths, the sufferers of body horror. The ambient psychedelia of being black concentrated into 90 minutes.

Onstage at Brooklyn Mirage on Friday night, FlyLo was an icon, smiling, laughing and unforgiving, on a path from which he couldn’t be diverted (you might as well try to stop a spaceship with your bare hands). So, moving music into the third dimension … again, it tracks. Flying Lotus “in 3D” was an intimidating, futuristic behemoth, surrounded by an armada of projectors floating on obelisks jutting out of the ground, and dislocated an entire sold-out audience from conventional space-time. It tracks.

Songs from You’re Dead! became travails through a real underworld. Scenes from Flying Lotus’s film directorial debut, Kuso, a carnival of grotesqueries, became real horrors. Flamagra took us to another dimension—it’s our world, but it’s also not. And through it all, FlyLo was in stitches. For the last song of the night, “Them Changes,” Thundercat and Chris Rock emerged as if from nowhere: “Nobody move, there’s blood on the floor.” We couldn’t have even if we’d wanted to. Warping mishaps can have brutal consequences—these delights are violent. In this antigenre conglomerate (or is it just time travel?), every lurching movement between genre and musical lexicon is a wormhole. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ

Faye Webster – Webster Hall – March 1, 2022

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I think the pedal steel in Faye Webster’s music is there for. It’s a signpost for genre, of course: It summons the country and western milieu, as reliably as other dusty and kitschy textures she favors, like twinkling Rhodes pianos and a deep, thumping electric bass. On Tuesday night, it drew the crowd gathered for Webster’s sold-out appearance at Webster Hall (no relation) into an hour-long saloon slow dance. The sense of setting is important for her lyrics, which are heart-eyed and lost, and her forlorn squeak of a voice.

But Webster doesn’t really write about life on the prairie, or even windswept hair on cross-country drives. Instead, she lets that pedal steel, played achingly by Matt “Pistol” Stoessel live as on record on 2021’s I Know I’m Funny Haha, ooze all over songs about conversations, connections and lost love. The images in Webster’s world are as nostalgic as any pastoralist memory, but they’re unabashedly digital. On Tuesday night she covered the song “7PM,” from the Animal Crossing: New Leaf video-game soundtrack, complete with the game’s gibberish vocoder chirp, and on Instagram she made tour announcements using the defunct Nintendo DS messaging software PictoChat.

Washed Out – Brooklyn Steel – February 7, 2022

Look, I’m tired of using words like dreamy and ghostly to describe music, and you’re tired of reading it. I’m tired of writing shit like the phrase yawning synths but seeing Washed Out at Brooklyn Steel on Monday was a real reckoning and ultimately a way of putting that vocabulary—which raised me, by the way—into its historical context. Ernest Greene’s synths may not have been the first ever to have yawned, but they are certainly an iconic stop on a winding path of curated chill aesthetics that leads to such delights as lo-fi hip-hop, Instagram filters and VSCO that we all enjoy today.

And although musicians often come to resent the shorthand that comes to be associated with their music, Greene seems at peace with his stereotype as a chill dude making chill music for chill people to catch a perfectly, exquisitely chill vibe to. In fact, last night at Brooklyn Steel he seemed to court such designations. Tie-dyed T-shirts in lavender at the merch table were sold to my fellow stoned millennials, and behind Greene onstage, fans billowed a white tarp with black-and-white scenes that warped and undulated projected onto it. And, yes, they were both dreamy and ghostly—my friend called them scenes from a perfume ad, grayscale videos of the ocean, and white women running through fields and smoking cigarettes and shit—that’s what we thought was arty back in the days of indie sleaze, the equivalent of a looped video of an anime girl scribbling in a notebook to accompany a lo-fi hip-hop stream.

But Washed Out’s music was as earnest as ever, sounding like Daft Punk in slow motion, with layers of gut-wrenching vocoder harmonies stretched over mellowed timescales, dance music interrupted by crashing waves of melody and emotion. And if you’ve never heard of a song called “Feel It all Around,” that’s fine, but when it dropped at Brooklyn Steel on Monday, I—and every other millennial in the building—was transported back to a simpler, cheugier time. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ

100 Gecs – Terminal 5 – December 9, 2021

Remember how humor in music used to be a fraught topic? 100 Gecs later, we’re now all in on the joke—the joke being that everything is always both a joke and not a joke—but I remember when you couldn’t so much as listen to, say, a Vampire Weekend album without an answer key pointing out who exactly was laughing at whom in any given lyric. Back then, the primary way to be considered artistically serious was to be, well, serious—more specifically, morose and bearded. Now, to be funny has been folded into what it means to say something profound.

So, when Laura Les and Dylan Brady interrupted their sold-out Terminal 5 set on Thursday with two acoustic guitars, you kind of braced yourself for a punchline. But when they strummed out an acoustic version of “Gecgecgec,” from their breakthrough 2019 album, 1000 Gecs, it was hard to know whether to laugh or let yourself be moved, especially when 10 minutes earlier Les had introduced “a cover of ‘New York, New York’ as made famous by Frank Sinatra,” and the duo proceeded to sit on the floor and tap out an unintelligible melody on a toy glockenspiel and then beat the shit out of the instrument until it broke. But then she played an acoustic-guitar solo that’s … actually really good, and you remained in the charged, half-joke limbo that all of 100 Gecs’ music emerges from.

Last night, the hyperpop duo ran through a litany of other 1000 Gecs favorites, inciting mosh-pits hits like “Money Machine” and “Stupid Horse.” The sound a raucous collision of every thrill in pop music—the way metalcore does sudden thunderous rap breaks, the way pop-punk does nasally hooks, the way Top 40 does sweet harmonies, all pressed into a shining composite, crushed into glitter and thrown haphazardly into the air. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ

(100 Gecs play Terminal 5 again on Saturday.)

Floor-length gold skirt glistening, Alaina Moore returned to the stage. Tennis’s last tour ended near disaster: a health scare for Moore and the death of Patrick Riley’s father nearly ended the band. Then, just as they had prepared a set supporting their most recent (and best) album, 2020’s Swimmer, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and they lost all of their income. So Thursday night at Brooklyn Steel was part of a homecoming to the stages they once called home—and that they so nearly had to leave forever.

About midway through the show, Moore asked, “What’s the use in resisting?” That question, from “Fields of Blue,” off their 2018 album, Yours Conditionally, framed Tennis’s return. Throughout their tightly performed set, vocalist and keyboardist Moore and guitarist Riley, backed by touring members Ryan Tullock on bass and Steve Voss on drums, asked the audience what is so frightening about oblivion. A lot of bands claim to groove, but Tennis really do. Of all the things that set them apart from their contemporaries in the world of synth-led indie pop—wife Moore’s startlingly pure soprano and husband Riley’s warbling guitars—the beating heart at the center of Tennis has always been a commitment to a groove. Onstage on Thursday, the band thumped valiantly, bringing to life the rhythms that pulse through their recorded material.

But in the end, it’s all about Moore and Riley. When the couple returned to the stage, the singer now in a wedding dress, to perform the sing-along “Matrimony,” the crowd was ensnared. Thanks to their hazy, sincere pop, suddenly all the various oblivions Tennis sing about—marriage, death, life, the deep blue sea—didn’t seem quite as scary as they might have. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ