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Friday night was a very unusual night at Largo. Not that any evening in Los Angeles’ best venue is ever uneventful, but Friday felt strange from the moment I took my seat. Jon Brion’s usual set-up–a drum set, bass, guitar rack and his trusty piano on stage right–was transformed, the rhythm section replaced by a second, larger piano. His looping pedals were notably absent. He took the stage in a pinstriped three-piece suit and performed the only completely acoustic set I’ve ever seen him play, running through a handful of unreleased (LP2?) tracks such as “Please Stay Away From Me” and “The Love Of My Life So Far” (played gorgeously on a nylon-string guitar) as well as several that I’d never heard. He played one song — “It Should’ve Been With You,” perhaps? — that he said no one ever had, though its high piano melody seemed familiar.

All that would’ve been treat enough, but he was joined mid-set by Fiona Apple (!) for the duo’s usual jazz standards and an exuberant, if imprecise, version of When the Pawn... classic “A Mistake.” Largo is a place where it’s O.K. to make mistakes; it’s almost better that way. It reminds you that the geniuses you see on stage are still human, an epiphany I had for the first time ever during a Jon Brion set when he casually told Apple he didn’t know the harmonies on a particular song. I’ve probably seen him a dozen times since 2004 — the thought of him missing a page of his musical encyclopedia seemed about as likely as faster-than-light particles. It appears we live in the future.

It happened again during one of his several encores, when he worked his way through what he could remember of “Song for Caden,” from the Synecdoche, New York soundtrack. “I haven’t played that since I recorded it,” he told the crowd apologetically. Then he turned in a transcendent Thelonius Monk version of Kiss’ “Rock and Roll All Night.” Brion may be a mere mortal after all, but he’s still the best one we have.

If 2011 brings me no further musical accomplishments than seeing Ryan Adams three times, I’d say it’s been a banner year. The Rawkblog hero returned for a third Los Angeles date on Wednesday, coming to legendary producer Bob Clearmountain’s Berkeley Street Studios to play a private session for KCRW‘s Morning Becomes Eclectic. The show will air on Dec. 2, but a few highlights: the intimate space allowed him to play an even quieter show than his Largo or Hollywood Forever appearances, with his falsetto barely above a whisper on songs such as “Like Yesterday.” It’s astounding how much control Adams has over his vocals; to call him alternative country’s Mariah Carey is a clumsy analogy, but you get the point. Ever the charmer, he spent as much time joking and tuning as playing songs, managing to pull plenty of new material. (An Adams/Jeff Tweedy comedy tour would be as funny as anything at Largo. Hell, they should just do a night there.) In his interview with KCRW’s Jason Bentley, he gave an exhaustive analysis of black metal and laughingly discussed the “failure” of his mid-career: “All it took was the live shows and everything else was poop icing on the shit cake.” Not sure if they can play that on the radio.

Adams is nothing but enthusiastic: he’s a metal nerd, I imagine, because being a nerd about anything is intensely satisfying. (Unless you’re a message-board Ryan Adams nerd, in which case you probably need a vacation.) It’s felt pretty special to see his enthusiasm in safe spaces this year, and judging by the quality of his performances on Wednesday, it doesn’t get any safer than having Clearmountain on the boards. Seeing Adams play these stripped-down shows makes you focus on the details — the intricacies of the guitar picking and the emotional colors of his rising and falling voice. I went home, put on Cold Roses and heard subtleties in his performances I’d never noticed. The gulf between hearing and listening can be enormous, but when you have the chance, I encourage the latter.

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Real Estate

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All photos by David Greenwald

Enjoy the photos. All I have to say about Big Troubles and Real Estate’s sets is that they were really great; James Ferraro’s, which was half pointless synth-ambient and half pointless cavewoman skronk, was either performance art or the worst set of 2011. Please note the Wedding Singer-era Adam Sandler look-a-like on the hot sax.

Previously: Review: Real Estate – Days

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In One Wind

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An excellent show from L.A.’s Big Moves (sounding exceptionally smooth), Gothic Tropic (sounding reasonably reverb-y) and Brooklyn’s In One Wind. The New York band’s latest, How Bright a Shadow, is one of the year’s most promising debuts, a chamber-folk plate piled high with male-female harmonies and intricate songwriting. At times, the songs twist into knots they can’t untie — puzzles that Dirty Projectors, In One Wind‘s most obvious influence, would slice in two with sheer virtuosity. But getting within spitting distance of their Brooklyn neighbors’ sonic ambition is an achievement nearly all of this year’s new bands failed to attempt: credit for that, and for the moments that make it look easy.

Big Moves – “Groundbreaking Studies”: mp3

All photos by David Greenwald

The worst thing an artist can do is have nothing to say. EMA, like a magpie, has plucked at convenient bits of rock history (Debbie Harry’s style, Kurt Cobain’s guitar playing) and stitched them together into the facsimile of something fresh. Watching her was like watching the Gus Van Sant version of Psycho. Were she performing in a warmer genre — twee-pop, maybe, or folk — she would’ve been easier to like, but as it was, her sour punk rehash was icy and airless. The band was painfully competent, avoiding the technical virtuosity that might’ve made them intellectually compelling and the amateurishness that could’ve turned them human. To her credit, Erica M. Anderson is a fine student of the rock playbook, prancing and prowling about the stage with leonine confidence. But it has to be said: if she wasn’t a pretty, stylish young woman with a choppy haircut, she would have a deserved thin sliver of her current popularity. Do you know how I know this? Show me an unpretty indie singer and I’ll show you a band you’ve never heard of.

By contrast, Wild Beasts offered dazzling musicianship and charisma hairy and powerful enough to climb the Empire State Building. Despite Radiohead’s ubiquitous American popularity, growing up in their shadow has had a more profound effect on the musicians of their native Britain; there’s an intensity and ambition in Wild Beasts’ music that’s simply absent from most of their domestic counterparts. The group opened with “Lion’s Share” and immediately established their hold over the room: unlike this year’s terrific Smother, the band’s live performance is anything but gentle. The rhythm section boomed with sub-bass eruptions and Bonham-esque drumming, hammering the crowd into the ground even as dueling singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming’s melodies and guitar lines pirouetted skyward. Either Thorpe or Fleming could offer the band a sterling full-time lead singer; watching them balance each other’s raw charisma was to witness an act of staggering generosity.

None of their material was less than gripping, but Smother‘s songs, removed from their bedroom atmospherics, were the hardest to deny. If their set had a flaw, it was location: Wild Beasts could’ve played to Coachella’s polo fields on Thursday night and still struck each listener in the heart. Or whatever part of them was most susceptible to thunderous bass.

The notion of objectivity is always a convenient ruse in pop criticism, but I have to admit I’m probably not emotionally equipped to tell you what I saw last night with any degree of reality. I might as well have been watching the Beatles. Yes, dear reader, I am a Ryan Adams Fan, and last night he played maybe the best concert I’ve seen in my life. It helped that the performance came at Largo, the only club in Los Angeles — maybe the world — where there are no cell phones, no cameras, no conversations, no clinking drinks, where artists truly let their hair down and take their shoes off and play the kind of shows you wish they’d play every night.

It was a secret show, an actual secret and not a secret sponsored by a deodorant brand or revealed on Twitter three days earlier, but somehow Ryan nerds found out: he took the stage to a standing ovation and got (deserved!) laughs for pretty much every line of banter for the next two hours. A friend in high places found me a ticket and put me on the free drinks list at the Roger Room afterparty, so, you know, full disclosure. The music was spectacular: the first set found him playing the “hits” (four songs from Heartbreaker, a handful from Gold and Easy Tiger, four of the new songs from lovely, somber Ashes & Fire) with the careful tenderness that has characterized his 2011 touring. His voice was miraculous, easing from delicate falsetto to full-throated choruses like a very expensive car changing gears. In the encore, he brought out the deep catalog jams: he closed with 29 classic “Strawberry Wine” (validating this writer’s six years of solitary 29 fandom) after playing through “Carolina Rain,” Love Is Hell‘s “My Blue Manhattan” and “Please Do Not Let Me Go,” Whiskeytown’s “16 Days” and “Jacksonville Skyline,” “Everybody Knows” and Gold b-side “Cannonball Days.”

He seemed jovial but twitchy, shifting about his chair and tuning neurotically between each song; nevertheless, once he began strumming, he played with complete confidence. Some of that uneasiness seemed performative in itself, with several of his jokes taking aims at the expectations that have wrongly dogged his career: “Alright, back into character. No laughing. That’s not allowed in alternative country,” he said early on. (An even funnier joke regarding Pitchfork and the reverb use of “cool bands” arrived later.)

It literally could not have been better. (I mean, he could’ve played “Anybody Wanna Take Me Home,” I guess.) Through another miracle, I’m seeing him again tonight at Hollywood Forever; I will report back. In the meantime: if you are going to see a Ryan Adams tour, this is the one.

Related: On Rawktumblr, a full setlist and more of his semi-verbatim jokes.

Last Wednesday, a particularly strange quote appeared on Matthew Perpetua’s Tumblr blog, in reference to James Blake:

This is a microcosm of a lot of what I am finding increasingly infuriating in indie culture, i.e., a total rejection of overt masculinity, and this feeling that anyone who is at all macho is the enemy. Why does this culture have to be entirely the domain of skinny, sniveling beta males? Why is aggression, sexuality and physicality in music automatically conflated with a bad scene? We need to really think about this.

This perspective is off-putting for a handful of reasons, not least of which being Perpetua’s ostensible R.E.M. fandom — would he prefer that Michael Stipe be more butch? — and the long-standing existence of punk and metal and other musics designed to meet these needs, leaving recent indie rock, folk and twee to the domain of bookish romantics. But the growing, seemingly antithetical diversity of indie listeners’ tastes — epitomized perfectly by Kanye West and Justin Vernon’s collaborations — does need a middle ground. Something between Vernon’s forlorn strumming and West’s pictures-of-my-dick braggadocio.

The genre’s future may well be Jens Lekman, an artist Perpetua would no doubt dub a “beta male” for his self-deprecating humor and supreme devotion to melodic sweetness. He’s certainly skinny enough (and potentially balding). But Lekman’s songs, especially those of 2007′s Night Falls Over Kortedala, are the boldest of his generation. On Wednesday night, accompanied by a lone drummer and drolly warning the audience, “I feel great tonight, I’m sorry,” he played a set that encompassed acoustic vulnerability, political satire and a hip-hop-worthy dance party complete with that rarest of L.A. activities, actual dancing.

The first half of the set included the songs of his new EP, a handful of You’re So Silent Jens classics (including probably the definitive solo version of “Black Cab”) and a few tracks that should make his next full-length. Many of the unreleased new songs in his rotation (“Cowboy Boots,” “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name”) are bittersweet break-up ballads akin to the sad songs of his first album, When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog. He is a still a wonderful creator of these songs; if anything, “Cowboy Boots” is as haunting a combination of narrative and melody as he’s ever done. It’s the political stuff, including the EP’s “Waiting for Kirsten” and the more jovial, anti-macho “I Stopped a Fight” which stumbled a bit, though Lekman’s pro-socialism monologues earned pockets of applause from the audience of former Obama voters. The overstuffed verses of “Waiting for Kirsten,” in particular, try too hard to equate the ridiculousness of trying to meet a celebrity with Gothenburg’s metaphorical “VIP lines.”

But things got smoother. He saved the Kortedala jams until the end of the set, where they arrived with immediate impact: “Sipping on the Sweet Nectar” turned the crowd into a bespectacled R. Kelly video, complete with a trio of young women invading the stage. That was before I noticed the circle of ironic iPhone glowstickers, one of the dorkiest, most celebratory things I’ve ever seen at a show. Would it have happened with Skrillex playing to the same room? Would they have felt safe and confident or under assault? It doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of physicality in Lekman’s music, as there is sorrow and joy and humor and self-awareness. Now, more than ever, his songs covers the full gamut of human feeling; it is the art we say we want, or at least the kind we should.

Opening the show was Geoffrey O’Connor, Crayon Fields frontman and the latest virtual unknown to receive the Lekman Fans Talking About Twitter Or Whatever During An Opening Set In Los Angeles treatment. He played mostly by himself, a brave move if he’d seen the all-but-tomato-throwing crowds encountered by the Honeydrips at Lekman’s 2008 Music Box gig. O’Connor’s solo stuff, less propulsive than his band’s smooth indie-pop material, recalled the reverb-flooded ebb and flow of Roxy Music’s Avalon if not always its charisma.