The A.V. Club’s favorite Madison shows of 2011
Danny Brown
Joyce Edwards
The best shows in Madison this past year were also the most swoon-worthy and exorcizing with the Smith Westerns and Primus, respectively. In February the Smith Westerns crooned love ballads between pouts and rubbed the sleep out of their eyes as they wooed the crowd with “Dreams.” Meanwhile, Primus was expectedly weird yet totally awesome this past October with reeling stage antics and Les Claypool’s bass hypnotizing the crowd into much anticipated insanity.
Tyler Fassnacht
Admittedly, when I found out that Boris was coming to Madison, I wasn’t a huge listener. I had read the name all around the Internet, listened to a few records of their daunting discography and knew that they were kind of a big deal in terms of live acts. I would just like to point this out because there are many bands I saw this year that I am more familiar with and like more than Boris, however, this concert still trumps them all. There were a couple factors that really made this show shine, the first being how well rounded it was in terms of bands. With riff-punk trio Coliseum, and math-rock pedal stompers Tera Melos as support, this bill was so varied in terms of genres, yet had common themes shared amongst all the bands. The most obvious quality was noise and volume. Each group went above and beyond sonically to really stimulate the audience; it was great. When Boris finally came out, it made it clear that this was the kind of band that strived in a live setting. Dressed all in black, each member brought a personality to the stage, making it all the more performance-like. It seemed like the band increased volume as the set went on, finally finishing with a 15-minute noise jam that was dizzyingly loud. Even at 90 minutes it seemed too short. They killed it.
One of the most all around enjoyable shows I went to all year was the Middle Brother “Four-hour Extravaganza,” featuring the new Americana supergroup with supporting slots from associated bands Dawes, Deer Tick, and the loveable Jonny Corndawg. When they advertised the show as more of an “extravaganza,” I was a little skeptical of the overall legitimacy of such a distinction. The following show proved this to actually be a great term for the show. With each band getting a relatively large set, the evening actually did last about four hours and felt more like a festival of some sorts. Adding to the general tomfoolery and circus-like connotations, various members from the groups all came out to collaborate on each other’s songs, to the point where it was a little hard to tell who was an official member of which band. The diversity in music may have been poor, but the energy among the musicians and the crowded audience was high and everyone was seemed intent on having a blast. For a night filled with dancing, hooting and hollering, fist pumping and sing-a-longs, it would be hard not to remember it as one of the best of the year.
Emily Genco
Some concerts are better forgotten, ripped from memory and unceremoniously discarded like a sweaty T-shirt after a marathon. Others are worth holding on to and savoring. This year appearances by The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Das Racist, Danny Brown, Deer Tick, and Guards ranked among this elite few.
Pains wrapped fans in a lo-fi haze when it played the High Noon in September. Madison-born frontman Kip Berman’s spasmodic guitar style and Peggy Wang’s fizzy synth lines added zest to the band’s sugary pop sound. Fans thundered in response to material off 2011’s Belong, many borrowing the Jersey Shore crew’s go-to move and first-pumped through the set.
The High Noon also hosted Das Racist and Danny Brown when they barreled into town October with rhymes and swagger at the ready. Prophet of mayhem Danny Brown introduced the chaos sashaying across the stage and boasting about “that income tax swag.” Das Racist kick-started its set with the robot-rap single “Who’s That Brooown!” While playing air guitar and distributing shots to the audience, the Brooklyn-trio treated fans to a video montage that would leave even Freudian scholars slack-jawed and stammering.
The Deer Tick and Guards show at the Majestic in November began with echoing, ’60s-inspired vocals and devolved into beer-gurgling mischief. While the bands showcased immense talent, their tomfoolery captivated the audience looking for any excuse to raise a glass. The balcony above the stage provided prime placement to drop ice cubes, beer, and a plunger. To end the night, John McCauley led Deer Tick in the unbuttoned anthem “Let’s All Go To The Bar.”
These groups roused the audience, took risks and embraced mischief, but with Los Campesinos! and Cults on the horizon for the New Year, 2012’s looking as bright.
Ben Munson
Of course Bon Iver in December at the Orpheum was fantastic, but I feel like I’ve talked about that band, Justin Vernon, and that album so much this year that I’m close to ruining it for myself. Besides, honestly, the memory that still sticks out the most for me from that show was someone shouting “Are you real?” at impossibly spritely opener Lianne La Havas. Destroyer at the High Noon in April felt a little like a moral victory for me, since I’ve been a fan of the Dan Bejar project since Streethawk: A Seduction came out in 2000 but I had never seen him live. Seeing him standing up there, looking uncomfortable and reading lyrics off a sheet of paper, I’d say that he didn’t disappoint. But as far as accomplishing a longtime goal, seeing Davey Von Bohlen play Promise Ring songs solo on an acoustic guitar took the cake and watching him sketch out the setlist beforehand made 19-year-old Ben Munson’s head explode.
Another experience that stands out not so much because I loved the music, but more because it felt momentous, was watching Tom Morello freeze his balls off along with the rest of us on the Capitol steps in February. It was obscenely cold, yet he and cohorts like Tim McIlrath (of Rise Against) and Wayne Kramer (of MC5) smiled through the impromptu acoustic set because it seemed like they really wanted to be there.
But my favorite show of the year was Man Mantis and Asumaya at the Terrace in June. There were just so many things that made it special, in particular that it was Mitch Pond’s first time performing solo as Man Mantis and he crushed it. It was also my first time seeing Asumaya, the solo project for Control’s Luke Bassuener, and he was just incredible. He was also gracious enough to go first because the sun was still too bright for Mantis to see the lights on his set-up. The show was part of our annual summer concert series, and if you know how fickle the crowd can be at the Terrace, then you understand my delight in seeing that a show that I’d curated actually pleased the diverse audience. But even a crowd more concerned with drinks and conversation could see that something great was happening onstage.
Adam Powell
A rare performance by Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis of Peaking Lights packed Mickey’s Tavern with an amazing array of tense-looking art students, oddball bleach-blond rockers sporting Ozzy tats, slight weirdos in tight pants, retro new-wavers, and straight-up freaks. The band kept loading in more and more equipment, connecting stomp boxes, clocks, shortwave radios, busted-up toys, and reel-to-reel magnetic tape playback devices into an exciting oblong of electronics, taking a really long time to set it all up. But then, these two created a sonic miasma of bright, colorful square-wave tones with rumbling blobs of dub bass and deedly-deedly Kentucky Farfisa bits topped off by astonishingly plaintive vocals. The crowd was abuzz with talk about their breakout record 936 and it felt like the last time anyone would see this stuff in such an intimate venue—the band signed to Domino label Weird World this fall, and who knows what’s next? Peaking Lights just released a mini-documentary filmed at their home in Madison commemorating this juncture. It reveals something of the personal lives of the curious humans behind these trippy, organic grooves, and introduces their quite cute baby, another future star by the looks of it.
Joel Shanahan
There’s nothing I dig more than stumbling into a random show where I’ve never seen or heard any of the lineup and getting my skull blown off. Bullet-belted thrash-foursome Panther was exactly that band this year. I was left slack-jawed as drummer Abrandon All Hope’s d-beat blasts head-butted into speed-picked basslines from Matt Jacobs and infectiously brutal riffing from guitarist Bo Drury. Add the whiskey-charged growls of screamer Marit Stafstrom and we have a band that should start touring immediately. 2011 also saw a nice batch of avant-garde musicians creep through town. On the electronic spectrum, Detroit’s Wolf Eyes brought a mountain of strange gear into Mickey’s for a squintingly loud batch of ear-shattering numbers. Where many noise-powered groups prefer to lean on improvisational live sets, Wolf Eyes impressively succeeded in recreating actual tunes from throughout their massive back catalog. Acoustic experimentalists Pelt also swung through for an entrancing, gong-powered set of organic drones and hypnotic plucking at the Gates Of Heaven synagogue.
Kyle Sparks
Boiled down to its core, the overwhelmingly depressive solo debut from Erika M. Anderson’s EMA, Past Life Martyred Saints, makes a 22nd birthday seem like an apocalyptic proposition. That kind of thing resonates more with some of us than others, to be sure. But I didn’t need to be an existentially lost 22-year-old to appreciate the way she purged her emotional insecurities and wallowed in universal disdain, only to come out on the other side of each song as a congenial hostess for the 40-some people who made it out to the High Noon Saloon that evening in July. She smiled and cracked jokes, making easy friends with the crowd. One of those friends made a bigger impression than others.
Goth-pop starlet Nika Roza Danilova (Zola Jesus) hopped on stage to sing backup in an impromptu rendition of Tommy James And The Shondells’ “Crimson And Clover.” It was messy to say the least—the kind of thing you get when two people use their immense talent to try and cover for the fact they hardly know the song they’re playing. But it’s also the kind of royal indie moment that you never expect to exist outside of a James Murphy track; and certainly the kind of story Grandpa Kyle Sparks will tell all the neighborhood’s indie kids once he’s accepted that they will not, in fact, just get the heck off his lawn already.
A close second was Bill Callahan’s performance at the Memorial Union Terrace for Rhythm and Booms. Callahan’s breezy folk and velvet baritone were an unexpected choice to accompany the otherwise flashy and bombast celebration of Independence Day, but his wry humor and poignant lyrics proved to be the perfect remedy to the otherwise nauseating fanfare.
Andrew Winistorfer
While my favorite Madison shows in 2010 were of the indie rock variety, my favorite shows in 2011 were all hip-hop. Even though that Despot, Danny Brown, and Das Racist show at High Noon was talked about already, and I can't include seeing Jay-Z and Kanye West on the Watch The Throne tour in Chicago, there were still three other hip-hop shows that were great this year. I was already entirely sold on Big K.R.I.T. before seeing him at the Majestic in April—I saw him perform at SXSW a few weeks earlier—but watching him win over a Madison crowd with a Packers Starter jacket and a set heavy on the then-days-old Return Of 4eva was like discovering him again for the first time. In terms of sheer memorability, it’s tough to beat watching the Billie James Project in a great one-off performance that scared the piss out of a family of lookie loos who wandered into the Rathskeller this summer and saw Dudu Stinks in the middle of symbolically hanging himself with his microphone cord.
But the best show I saw in Madison was Yelawolf at the Majestic Theatre in March. I went into the show, again, already sold on Yelawolf—Trunk Muzik 0-60 was one of my favorite albums of 2010—but I went in sort of skeptical at his ability to wow a Tuesday night crowd. I expected a small, indifferent crowd, and a solid performance. But from the moment he charged onstage, to the second time he dove off the Majestic’s balcony into the sizable hyped-up crowd’s willing arms, it was the most wild, aggressive, and downright fun show I went to all year. Yela might have bricked with Radioactive—dude bent over backwards to sell himself as a pop star—but his live show will still stand as one of my most pristine musical anythings in 2011.
