Should NYU faculty and their dependent children receive full tuition remission?
Atlas Sound's Bradford Cox shared a little too much information on Thursday night.
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"My ass is sweating," he informed the quiet group of NYU students who were still adjusting to the glacial unfolding of his campfire songs.
Two girls near the front of the stage jerked up from their cell phones and shared a look of disgust: No ass sweat for them tonight. They slithered their way out through a rapidly diminishing crowd as Cox went back to crafting his harmonica-heavy troubadour echoes for anyone who cared to listen.
Though aurally entertaining, the Atlas Sound slow-burn stifled the triple bill of music at Kimmel's Eisner and Lubin Auditorium, which had peaked with the spaceship-soaked dance fusion of Neon Indian. The band has been ubiquitous in the blogosphere recently, going from obscurity to selling out shows after a not-so-subtle Pitchfork pimp-out. Neon Indian's music is what you imagine aliens listen to when they've had too much to drink, and some stumbling tech support alien presses a few too many buttons and makes the spaceship gurgle and whine. As the aliens party, you can hear muffled voices of the humans they've captured, yearning for human relationships and a way home.
Band leader Alan Vega, curly hair dripping from sweat and knob-twiddling effort, did his best to incite a dance party even when the crowd seemed more interested in texting in public. It's unfortunate, because songs like "Should Have Taken Acid With You" are the deadbeat druggie's answer to Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody" — half as grandiose and twice as giddy. The full band was especially entertaining to watch, adding helium harmonies and a guitarist who I heard compared by three separate people to Esqueleto from "Nacho Libre" or Violet from "The Incredibles" — no matter how much funk he cranked out.
Then Cox took the stage, gangly and smiling, and slowly suffocated the residual dance-drip. "Logos," one of the best albums of 2009, made the WSN end-of-year list for its noisy bliss. Live, Cox reproduces the entire album, slowly layering track upon track, the songs taking forever to ripple off each other and coalesce into a climax. But the virtuosity required to create the full-fledged soundscapes and the volume Cox spits out of his acoustic guitar, Atlas Sound is still sleepy music. Cox plays the guitar like there's pain in every downward stroke, and lyrics like "When I get to paradise" in "Attic Lights" convey a similar longing. Cox turned paranoid in "Criminals," moaning "you think that I don't know" over and over on top of a drumbeat that recalled David Bowie's "Five Years." "Sheila" was an upbeat jolt after an extended stretch of somnambulism, but it stretched out into another endless exercise in echoes.
Before his encore, Cox presented a new song, claiming to have written it the week before. He delivered it like a tripping Neil Young, right down to the vocal affectations. He was clearly disconcerted by the crowd's unresponsiveness; afterward, he said he didn't mean to disappoint anyone. For those who remained, he delivered an impassioned encore, ending the show by nearly fellating the microphone with animal grunts and growls. It wasn't a drunken alien dance party, but who needs that when you have Atlas Sound's ass-sweat?
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