PHILLY POST: [Ori] Feibush might be a hero, because he did something that needs to happen more often in Philadelphia: He saw a mess. And he cleaned up the mess. This being Philadelphia, of course he’s in trouble. The mess, you see, wasn’t Feibush’s to clean up. The debris-filled lot at 20th and Annin streets is owned by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority: Feibush owns the coffee shop next door. By his own estimation, he spent $20,000 to have 40 tons of debris removed from the site, and created what’s essentially a pocket park in its spot. In a better world, city officials would swallow their pride–and their rule book, for that matter–and either A) stay silent or B) publicly thank Feibush for his service to the community. Instead, they’ve let it be known they’re cranky and publicly branded Feibush a trespasser. “Like any property owner, [the authority] does not permit unauthorized access to or alteration of its property,” one official harumphed to the Daily News. “This is both on principle (no property owner knowingly allows trespassing) and to limit taxpayer liability.” That makes a certain kind of narrowly legal sense. But it’s difficult not to return to the bottom line here: Feibush saw a mess. And he cleaned up the mess. On his own dime. That should count for something good, right? It doesn’t, though. MORE

Photo courtesy of NFL FILMS

INQUIRER: Steve Sabol, an art history major and football star in college who combined those two passions to help transform the family business, NFL Films, into a modern mythmaking marvel, died Tuesday at 69. Mr. Sabol had been battling brain cancer since 2011. An inoperable tumor had been discovered just days after his father, Ed, the NFL Films founder, was elected to Pro Football’s Hall of Fame. A lifelong Philadelphia-area resident who never lost his accent or his boyish idealism, Mr. Sabol forever changed the way Americans view their sports. The theatrical instincts that grew out of his love of movies altered what had been a mundane business of filming sports highlights into an acclaimed art form, one that 50 years after NFL Films’ birth is universally imitated. Combining classical scores, poetic scripts, and the “Voice of God” narrations that John Facenda embodied with a variety of serious filmmaking techniques, NFL Films won critical praise, widespread popularity and scores of Emmy Awards. Mr. Sabol, a kind of Renaissance man who brought those sensibilities to the brutish sport, was honored himself with 35 Emmys in a variety of disciplines – writing, editing, directing, cinematography and producing. One of the poems Mr. Sabol wrote, “The Autumn Wind,” accompanied a short 1974 film on the era’s villainous Oakland Raiders that would become one of NFL Films signature pieces. “The Autumn Wind is a Raider,” Facenda says in a dramatic voice-over as slow-motion hits depict the team’s ferocity, “pillaging just for fun. He’ll knock you round and upside down and laugh when he’s conquered and won.” […] In 1962 he was at Colorado College of Mines, where he was an all-conference fullback, when his father, who not long before had been an overcoat salesman, purchased the rights to that year’s NFL championship game for $3,000. “My father called me when I was out there and he said, ‘I can tell by your grades that all you’ve been doing is playing football and going to the movies. That makes you uniquely qualified for this business I’ve started,’ ” Mr. Sabol said. MORE

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Consider the spiral. There are miles upon miles of iconic imagery in the NFL Films archive—running backs ribboning through defensive lines; foggy exhales on icy sidelines; agitated coaches saved by well-timed bleeps—but I will always remember the way those films could capture a football pass and draw it down into super-slow motion, high above the field, descending calmly, rotating in a graceful way that only a football thrown by a trained professional rotates. The football passes I threw in the backyard did not resemble this. These were footballs thrown in another, distant sport, spinning so crisply you could see the commissioner’s signature. It was mesmerizing, impossible to look away. It was almost a shame to watch them land, yanked out of the dream by a wide receiver. Or worse, a cornerback. MORE

THE ATLANTIC: In the summer of 1968, Steve Sabol went on the road. He was driving a beat-up old car with the windows open. From Pennsylvania to Ohio to Indiana, the towns drifted by, the neon vacancy signs outside the motels, the taverns, the fields where the high-school football teams played. Steve was 26, strong as a horse, his hair too long for the Podunk provinces. He had a reel-to-reel projector in the backseat, the kind every randy best man used to drag to stag parties in the 1950s. Each night, he set up in another wood-paneled room where, after the Kiwanians or Rotarians or Boy Scouts had finished their business, he showed his movie. He was stumping like a politician, building an audience for a film he’d made guerrilla-style, with nothing but a few thousand dollars and a vision. He wanted to show football as it might have been shown by the old Hollywood directors: the game as directed by John Ford.

They Call It Pro Football was produced by NFL Films, a small company Steve’s father, Ed, had founded as Blair Productions in 1962. After Steve had first shown it in New York several months earlier, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle shook his hand and said, “That’s not a highlight film, it’s a real movie.” But none of the TV networks were interested, so Steve had to find his viewers, one screening at a time, amassing an audience that would eventually be among the most prized in the marketplace. But even in the beginning, when there was just this determined kid and a weird movie that could not find a distributor, all the elements were there: speed, color, narrative. The first line of They Call It Pro Football sets the tone: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” MORE

THE ONION: Legendary sports broadcaster Harry Kalas narrated NFL Films co-founder Steve Sabol’s ascension to heaven Tuesday, providing a stirring play-by-play of the 69-year-old soul’s dramatic entry into the Kingdom of God. MORE

Sigur Ros, Skyline Stage at the Mann, last night by JONATHAN VALANIA

It’s official: The Mann’s just-unveiled Skyline Stage is now the go-to concert venue when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars and you and 5,000 of your closest friends want to see/hear widescreen, state-of-the-art indie-rock on the grass, under the stars, with yummy food trucks and ice-cold craft beers and a panoramic view of the emerald city skyline over your shoulder. That Sigur Ros should break the seal on this newly-minted venue is kinda like a teenage boy losing his virginity to a super model. Because sometimes — not often, but sometimes — fantasy manages to translate into reality and we all live happily ever after.

THIS JUST IN: Although tonight’s show is technically sold-out a small batch of tickets have been released for sale.

RELATED:Sigur Ros don’t sound like anyone else, but their luxuriously precise atmospherics are part of an independent spirited art-rock continuum that reaches back to the Cocteau Twins in the 1980s and on to contemporary fellow travelers like Radiohead and Bon Iver. And even though the band has been making music for a decade and a half, there’s still a strangeness to Sigur Ros’ otherworldly music which is part of what makes it so transporting. At the Mann, Jonsi did manage a few words in English: “This is our first show in four years. We are really enjoying ourselves. Thanks for coming.” When he sang, however, it was either in Icelandic or Vonlenska, the made up gibberish language also known as “Hopelandic.”  The oddity of his enigmatic enunciations to the English speaking ear add to the aura of mystery, as the arrangements move from interludes suited to contemplative introspection to fanfares of emotional catharsis. Sample conversation at a Sigur Ros show: “Do you know what this song is called?,” asks the critic with notebook. “No,” answers the smiling man singing along to syllables that have no meaning to him. “But I love it.” MORE

RELATED:  Live From Hopelandia

RELATED: Splendor In The Grass

FRESH AIR

Director Wes Anderson has many credits to his name — The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Bottle Rocket and Fantastic Mr. Fox among them — but Moonrise Kingdom is his first film to open the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton, the quirky independent picture tells the story of a 12-year-old girl and boy who fall in love and then make a pact to run off into the woods together. Anderson tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the movie, set on a remote (and fictional) island off the coast of New England, is what he calls “a memory of a fantasy.” “I remember the emotion of feeling like I was falling in love at that age, and how powerful it was and sudden and inexplicable,” he says. “And nothing happened in my case, but I think it’s a fantasy I would have had at that age — would have envisioned. … These two characters are hit by a thunderbolt and determined to act on it.” Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton and Bruce Willis star in the film — the story of a 12-year-old girl and boy who merge their imaginative worlds on an island off the coast of New England. Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, who play the preteens Suzy and Sam, were cast after an extensive search, says Anderson. “My experience with casting children is that … the whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear,” he says. “After we saw [Kara and Jared], we shut down the search, and they’re the ones who are in the movie. And they define the characters more than the script does, I think.” In the script, Sam and Suzy are separated by distance — Suzy is at home in her beach house, and Sam is away at scout camp — so they must traverse the woods to eventually find each other. Anderson himself was a scout for a short time as a child. He drew on those experiences while crafting the plot of Moonrise Kingdom, which stars Willis as a sheriff, Frances McDormand and Murray as absent-minded parents, and Norton as a hapless scoutmaster in charge of finding his missing camper. “Edward Norton was someone who I corresponded with over the years, and he was somebody who I thought of as a scoutmaster,” says Anderson. “He looks like he has been painted by Norman Rockwell.” Anderson says he drew on Rockwell, as well as his other films, while designing how Moonrise Kingdom would look. “I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets,” he says. “There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It’s sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I’ve made the decision: I’m going to write in my own handwriting. That’s just sort of my way.” MORE

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel released an album of hallucinatory folk-rock called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea that is, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, nothing short of a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, it is lightning caught in a bottle, one of those rare perfect albums that come along maybe once a decade.

Or once a lifetime.

In 1999, Jeff Mangum — Neutral Milk’s singer, songwriter and primary guitarist — disappeared from public life without explanation, declining all entreaties to perform or discuss the album or record a follow-up. Over the course of his decade-long Salinger-like hermitage, succeeding generations have discovered and come to revere the album, and as such it has become something like The Catcher In The Rye of indie-rock.

Two years ago he emerged from seclusion and started performing again, refusing to offer any explanation for his mysterious disappearance or sudden return. No matter. The ambiguity only seems to heighten the intrigue of his legend. Thursday night’s performance at the Irvine Auditorium, at Penn, sold out in 35 seconds.

Taking the stage dressed in a white cranberry-checked cowboy shirt and a droopy gray Mao cap, the 41-year-old Louisiana-born Mangum waved hello, took a seat, strapped on an acoustic guitar and tore into the slashing, Who-like opening chords of “Two-Headed Boy,” blaring the agony and ecstasy of the lyric with his trademark, heart-tugging yelp like it was 1998 all over again. MORE

*By ‘Santa Claus’ we of course mean Bruce Springsteen

What we told you way, way back on Jan. 19th has just been officially announced: The Boss will be at Wells Fargo Center March 28th. Tickets go on sale January 28th. Details after the jump…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 24, 2012

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND
ANNOUNCE FIRST US LEG OF 2012 ‘WRECKING BALL’ WORLD TOUR

Coming to Philadelphia for TWO SHOWS
March 28 & 29 // Wells Fargo Center

Tickets On-Sale this Saturday at 9am

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band launch the first US leg of the 2012 ‘Wrecking Ball’ World Tour on March 18 in Atlanta. Bruce Springsteen’s 17th studio album ‘Wrecking Ball’ will be released on Columbia Records on March 6.

Tickets for the two Philadelphia shows, March 28 and 29 at Wells Fargo Center, go on sale this Saturday, January 28 at 9am at ComcastTIX.com, the Wells Fargo Center box office or charge by phone at 800-298-4200. Tickets are $98 and $68.? “We Take Care Of Our Own,” the album’s first single,’ is “classic Springsteen” with “anguish and challenge [that] run thick and fast” (Rolling Stone); a “richly orchestrated Wall of Sound… that nods to the ‘Born to Run’ era” (Billboard).? The E Street Band’s members are: Roy Bittan – piano, synthesizer; Nils Lofgren – guitar, vocals; Patti Scialfa – guitar, vocals; Garry Tallent – bass guitar; Stevie Van Zandt – guitar, vocals; and Max Weinberg – drums; with Soozie Tyrell – violin, guitar, vocals and Charlie Giordano – keyboards.

[Illustration by ALEX FINE]

BY MIKE WALSH Let me make this clear up front: I’m not a Dylan-head, Dylan-ite, Dylan-phile, Dylan-ologist, or any other kind of extreme Dylan fan. In fact, I never bought a Dylan record or CD until just a few years ago. I never saw the need. Growing up in the ’60s, Dylan was on the radio all the time —“Blowing in the Wind,“ “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right,“ “The Times They Are a Changin’,“ “All I Really Want to Do,“ “It Ain’t Me Babe, “Mr. Tambourine Man,“ etc., etc. Plus, many other bands had hits with his songs, like Peter Paul and Mary, Hendrix, and The Byrds. There was no escaping Dylan back then. You listened to him whether you wanted to or not.

In college, it seemed like everybody in the dorm except me owned Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volumes 1 and 2. So I had to listen to the same songs all over again at just about every dorm party. One kid down the hall even had a guitar, a neck stand with a harmonica, and a music book of Dylan’s greatest hits. So I got to hear the same songs played and sung live — quite amateurishly, to put it kindly. By the mid-70’s I’d had quite enough of Dylan — so much so that I did a nasally, slurred vocal rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone“ just to torture the Zimmermanites, even though they never seemed to mind. In fact, they joined in no matter how obnoxiously I wheezed, “How does it feeeeeeeel?”, so the joke was always on me.

What I wanted to hear was something different, something that wasn’t on the radio. Soon punk and new wave surfaced, and I’ve been a slave to indie rock and the underground sounds ever since, as my record collection can attest. My opinion of Dylan stayed the same during all that time, even though I didn’t sing “Like a Rolling Stone“ quite so often (although I did work up an even more annoying version of “The Needle and the Damage Done“ but that’s another story).

Then about five years ago I met this kid at work. About 25 years my junior and with 80 gigs of remastered ’60s classics by The Who, Beatles, Kinks, Stones, Hendrix, and Dylan on his iPod. We worked together and made quite a pair: a young kid who listened to nothing but ’60s rock heroes and a middle-aged guy still looking for the latest underground thing. It didn’t compute. We had arguments about Roger Daltrey, who I cannot abide, and The Replacements, who the kid just refused to enjoy. It was The Odd Couple Revisited.

I grudgingly agreed to listen to his ’60s music, and behold — I became enraptured with Dylan, especially early Dylan. I pored through documentaries and books. I studied the deep LP cuts. I endured I’m Not There, and I tried my best to understand The Basement Tapes. Eventually even Dylan’s harmonica playing no longer made me cover my ears and hide. Part of Dylan’s appeal for me is the history and the myth, of course: Al Kooper, The Hawks, ‘Judas!’, Baez, Newport, Suze, Ginsburg, the whole crazy scene. I mean, aside from Brian Wilson who else from the ’60s can claim to have influenced the Beatles? In fact, the Beatles were still singing about holding hands when Freewheelin’ came out.

So when I heard that Dylan was appearing at the Mann, I figured it was my last chance to see him. I mean, the dude is 70, and it’s a miracle he’s still alive and touring. Plus, I wanted that one memory of Dylan, something to remember whenever I listened to another Dylan song. Wednesday night did not start off well. A traffic jam and parking confusion meant that we got to our seats just as the Leon Russell’s set was ending. But it did give me an opportunity to gaze in wonder at Russell’s astonishing appearance — a glowing white pyramid of hair, like some cross between Gandalf and ZZ Top. However, the covers of rock standards with which he ended his set, like “Roll Over Beethoven,” were eminently forgettable.

Soon I was in a food line and got into a conversation with a veteran of many Dylan concerts. I mentioned this was my first Dylan show. “It won’t sound like the Bob Dylan of the ’60s or ’70s,” he warned. “The performance is totally unsentimental. They play sixteen songs. The last two will be hits, like ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ or something like that, just to make everybody happy. Then they walk off stage. That’s it. The arrangements for his classic songs are completely different than his records, so it may take a minute or two to recognize them. Don’t be disappointed. So just sit back and enjoy a great rock band.”

That turned out to be very good advice because I could not recognize Dylan’s the first song until someone told me what it was “Leopard-Skin Pillbox-Hat.” “Don’t Think Twice,” which he also played early in the set, had what you might call a looping R&B beat and also took me a minute to realize what it was. But the very first thing I noticed was Dylan’s voice. It was so deep and rough, he made Tom Waits sound angelic. Throughout the show, he barked or purged a couple unintelligible syllables for each line, and I took it on faith that he was approximating the actual lyrics. The only lines I could clearly make out were the choruses of songs like “Tangled Up In Blue,” “Desolation Row,” and “Highway 61 Revisited.” I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise since Dylan has been shouting into microphones for 50 years and probably smoking for that long too.

Who cares about lyrics anyway? It was Dylan, man! Live! And it sounded like Dylan, and nobody sounds like that. So what if his voice has devolved into a gruff series of primal grunts and groans? Nothing wrong with primal. Plus, Dylan is a snappy dresser. He wore a chocolate brown suit with yellow piping, a wide brimmed white hat, and white boots — like some cross between a traveling minstrel and a hotel doorman. The rest of the band, in black except with white dinner jackets, set off Dylan’s flashy outfit even more.

Speaking of which, the band was terrific, providing rock solid rhythms to the mix of blues, country, soul, gospel, and jazz styles. The grooves featured a constant stream of spirited guitar leads and fills from the wonderful Charlie Sexton. But Dylan is no slouch as a player either, matching the band’s skill on organ most of the night. He took up the guitar on a couple songs, playing clean, solid guitar lines, especially on “Simple Twist of Fate.” His harmonica leads were impressive and confident as well. That skinny old cat can jam.

He played plenty of his classics, like “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, “Tangled Up in Blue,” and a long version of “Desolation Row,” along with more recent standouts, like “Mississippi” and “Blind Willie McTell.” The end of the main set was the highlight, with “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” and a haunting, driving “Ballad of a Thin Man.” I felt shivers when Dylan growled the surprisingly clear lines, “And something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” I don’t know exactly what that means, but me and the other 6,000 attendees knew it was some heavy shit.

The encore featured a straight version of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All Along the Watchtower,” which I barely recognized. Then the band lined up in front of the drums, Dylan nodded, and they left. Just like the guy said — unsentimental. Dylan didn’t speak to the audience at all during the show, except to introduce the band members. But he wasn’t standoffish either. He gave an emphatic performance, moving his body, bobbing his head, leaning into the mic, bracing for a harmonica lead, and swinging enough to let us know that he was into it and was working for us. His performance communicated more than enough for me. I mean, this was Bob frickin’ Dylan. He gets to do as he pleases. Mere mortals like you and me, we don’t get to criticize Dylan. For one night, I was happy just to bask in his uncompromising and eccentric genius. I may have been about 40 years late to my first Dylan show, but I’m sure glad I finally got to the promised land.

For more articles by Mike Walsh, go to missioncreep.com, a site that supports the work of numerous Philadelphia-area artists and writers.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER At the risk of sounding like the 21st century equivalent of the guy who booed Dylan at Newport for going electric, I should disclose up front that I am not a fan of the super-dense seven-layer cake of sound of Bon Iver’s new self-titled album, though not for lack of trying. For me, the beatific, naked-bulb bedroom folk of 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago remains definitive proof that less is more. Bon Iver mainman Justin Vernon is in full possession of the most heartbreakingly beautiful falsetto to emanate from a hairy guy in blue jeans and flannel since Neil Young woke up in a burned-out basement with a full moon in his eyes. So why hide it under a bushel? MORE

BY MATTHEW HENGEVELD While Bill O’Reilly and the Unfair & Biased clan are busy tarring and feathering Common, I’ve got a nagging feeling that somebody somewhere didn’t do their homework. Obama invited Common Sense to the White House last week and George H. W. Bush invited Eazy-E to the White House in 1991— but when it comes to thuggishness, real or manufactured, neither Common (Oh puh-leaze! The guy is like the Sesame Street of rap, and I mean that in a good way) or that dyed in the wool Republican Eazy-E hold a torch to the sheer pathology of Tyler, The Creator, leader of the much-buzzed-about Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All posse.

Tyler’s new solo album, Goblin (XL), is easily the most satanic record I’ve heard since Slayer’s Reign In Blood. Every aspect of the album (production, lyrics, themes, etc.) emanates Tyler’s deeply-disturbed 19-year-old brain which seems truly impressive at first, but in the end there’s only so much fucked up R.L. Stine shit you can be subjugated to. And it soon becomes apparent that Tyler’s hell-child attitude is about the extent of his game, and sorely missed is Odd Future’s sense humor and comaraderie (Odd Future beginners should check out Radical Mixtape or Earl Sweatshirt’s EARL EP).

Odd Future’s strong suit is its ability to evoke the likes of Wu-Tang, D.I.T.C., Heltah Skeltah, Insane Clown Posse, G-Unit, Dipset, etc. without mimicking them and Tyler crosses that line with Goblin. The line “I’m a fucking walking paradox” is just rehashing Earl’s “I’m a hot and bothered astronaut.” In the same sense, the repeated chants of “Wolf Gang” on “Sandwiches” is little more than a reinvention of the “Wu-Tang” chant. And it doesn’t end there.

While I’m loathe to admit that there are several striking similarities to “Kim”-era Eminem in Goblin, it is undeniably obvious that Tyler wants to be Eminem. When Tyler raps “Start jackin’ him off, ‘til his cack blastin off? Fuck that!” he is directly ripping Em’s imprecation on “Remember Me”: “Slim get’s blamed in a Bill Clint speech to fix these streets. Fuck that!” Tyler follows up with other lines that mimic Em’s delivery on “My Name Is.” I’m sure Marshall Mathers’ is not amused.

As for the beats, I wasn’t too disappointed.To be sure, they don’t bang as hard as “Double Cheeseburger” or “EARL,” but “Yonkers” and “Sandwitches” still capture the same menacing gravitational pull that defined Tyler as Odd Future’s leader in the first place. I was impressed by “AU79,” a bubbling instrumental track that plays after Tyler kills all of his friends. However, songs like “Bitch Suck Dick” (his mom must be so proud) and “Window” move at such a numbingly slow pace, simply finishing the track becomes a chore. And that fucking screaming shit on almost every track makes me want to strangle someone — mostly Tyler.

The article in this week’s New Yorker, “Looking For Earl Sweatshirt”, is a stern reminder that Odd Future of 2011 is not the same Odd Future of 2010. More specifically, there is a clear pre-Fallon/post-Fallon split that galvanized the original fan base and inadvertently flip-flopped the roles of persona and platter in Odd Future’s music. Posse-style rap groups are so hard to put your finger on, especially when the standout artist (Earl) seemingly disappears, and the leader (Tyler) becomes hip-hop’s Paris Hilton.

ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL PERFORM TONIGHT AT FIRST UNITARIAN

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER It is a fitting coincidence that Brit ‘It Girl’ Adele launched her much-anticipated stateside tour the same weekend that “Bridesmaids,” Team Apatow’s rowdy girl-centric answer to “The Hangover,” opens in theaters across the country. The former is a budding superstar, the latter is a burgeoning box office hit, and the common ground is that Adele is the celebrated maker of mass-appeal music that could aptly be described as chick-flick soul. Her calling card, of course, is that voice: Big, bracing and acrobatic enough to wow the nattering class that tunes in weekly for “American Idol,” but inflected with a hard-won world-weariness that defies her tender age. Her recently-released “21,” titled after the London-based singer-songwriter’s age when she recorded the album (Adele just turned 23), makes good on the promise of her lovelorn neo-soul breakout debut, “19,” while upping the ante artistically. All rainy days and Mondays, dead flowers and bittersweet regrets, “21” is post-break-up comfort food for the ears. Friday night at the way, way sold out Electric Factory (scalpers’ tickets were going for hundreds of dollars online), Adele could do no wrong in the eyes and ears of the faithful, an opinion largely shared by this neutral observer. MORE

[Photo byPIUMROSSA]

BY PELLE GUNTHER Brooklyn’s experimental Afro-rockers TV On The Radio have always caught my fancy, with their fascinating mash-up of prog and indie-rock, all tied together by the raw vocals of Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, and the six-string genius of Dave Sitek, but Friday night’s Electric Factory performance just didn’t quite make the grade. The band has great stage presence, and their songs are very solid, so it definitely had more to do with the actual performance, low energy level and a cloudy sound mix. As such, songs like the ever-popular “Staring at the Sun” didn’t have sufficient depth of sound, and felt a bit flat compared to the incredibly full sound of the recording.

Chalk it up to opening night jitters, as this was the first show of the tour in support of “Nine Types Of Light” (which comes out Tuesday), but there was definitely not enough energy coming off the stage to keep me focused. And the drunk and shirtless superfans in front of me who insisted on flinging their sweaty torsos at anything that moved definitely didn’t help my concert-ADD. In fact, I might have left early if it wasn’t for Tunde’s wild crooning as he bounced around the stage like a cracked up bunny and Kyp Malone’s wrenching vocals and his voluptuous beard.

The band started off the show with a song from their debut release called Young Liars, which must have had sentimental value to the band and their devout fans but for anyone with a lesser knowledge sounded quite foreign as an appetizer. In fact, most of the songs were either very old or so new nobody’s heard them yet, including a generous amount from Nine Types of Light. Personally, I was hoping for more tunes from the most-excellent Dear Science.

There were high points like “Wolf Like Me,” “Providence,” and “Dancing Choose” as well as a new song they played to kick off their encore, but the majority of the concert blurred into one indistinguishable slush punctuated by excruciating bursts of microphone feedback over and over again sorely tried my patience and I am guessing I was not alone. In all fairness, Nine Types Of Light will probably be the soundtrack to my life for the next few weeks, and when they come back around I will surely give them another chance.

Delaware and Race 1:27 PM by JEFF FUSCO

RELATED: The tug-boat mate in last summer’s deadly duck-boat accident was talking to family members on his cell phone about his son’s life-threatening emergency moments before the July 7 crash, according to an investigative report released Monday. The report from the National Transportation Safety Board said Matt Devlin, first mate on the tug Caribbean Sea, made or received 21 cell-phone calls during the 2.5 hours leading up to the accident. One of those calls began five minutes before the tug pushed a barge into the duck boat and continued until one minute after the accident, the NTSB report says. MORE

[Illustration via EDGEART]

BY JONATHAN VALANIA If Jonathan Richman didn’t already exist, we would have never thought to invent him, which is a testament to both his originality and the shortcomings of our collective imagination. For more than 35 years, Richman has been a tireless advocate of hopeful romanticism, rugged individualism and unyielding optimism, travelling the world like some post-modern Jimmy Stewart with a guitar telling anyone that would listen that, despite all the hard-bitten cynicism that surrounds him, it’s still a wonderful life. He is, in short, the immaculate heart on the dirty sleeve of rock n’ roll.

Performing before a capacity crowd Tuesday night at the First Unitarian Church, Richman was in peak form. Bearded and dressed in a green button down shirt with a crisp white T-shirt peaking out from underneath, Richman had the crowd eating out his hands — clapping in time, singing along, even joining him on stage to dance — all of which, he insisted, would make the evening “more like a party than one of them concerts.”

That Richman can disarm and charm a crowded, darkened church basement with little more than an acoustic guitar and the shuffling beats of longtime drummer Tommy Larkins is a testament to his prodigious powers as a song-and-dance man and the sheer infectiousness of his world view.. Even strong medicine like “When We Refuse To Suffer”, which rails against the modern inclination to chemically numb ourselves against negative emotions and insists that feeling bad is better than feeling nothing at all, tasted like a spoonful of sugar. He gently mocked the pretentiousness of youth with “My Affected Accent” and “Bohemia” and celebrated the magic of adult love in “Hurricane When She Came” and “My Baby Love Love Loves Me.”

He turned each song into a long elliptical vamp punctuated with witty asides, herky-jerky dance moves, snake-charmer guitar and, at one point, he cartwheeled across the stage much to the audience’s delight.

While he mostly focused on newer material — such as the pining “O Moon Queen of the Night On Earth” or the let’s-get-physicality of “These Bodies That Came To Cavort” or the old master homage of “No One Was Like Vermeer” — Richman did, on occasion, dig deep into his back catalog, most notably “Old World” from Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, arguably one of the most auspicious debuts in the history of auspicious debuts. He encored with “I Was Dancing At The Lesbian Bar” which was as mirth-making as the title suggests. Years from now  — many years, hopefully — when they write his epitaph, it will say something along the lines of: he left the world a happier place than he found it.