20 years of City Slang

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the record label City Slang, Broken Social Scene, Tortoise and Menomena take the stage on Saturday, November 20th. On the 19th, Calexico and Notwist performed; Lambchop, Yo La Tengo and Alexi Murdoch will be on the bill for the final night, Sunday. The chosen venue is stunning and full of charm: the Admiralspalast theatre on Friedrichstrasse, just a stone's throw from Unter den Linden, right in the heart of Berlin.

At 8pm it's Menomena's turn, and the start is dreamlike, with "Tithe", one of the finest songs from the band's latest album, the excellent "Mines", released this year. The American trio, backed by a guitarist, shows from the very first notes an enviable command of their complex alt-rock output, moving between rhythmic mid-tempos, horn incursions, distortion and moments of melodic calm, plus gripping piano detours. After the opening track, the rock jolt of "Taos" comes as a surprise, sung masterfully by Justin Harris on bass and sax. The three members of the band trade off on lead vocals with outstanding results, both in intensity and precision. "Mines", which has been met with unanimous critical praise, stands out as probably the peak of their career, thanks to their ability to bring together, more fully than ever before, all the centrifugal forces of their music, reworking a certain compositional schizophrenia (post-rock and acid-rock tendencies, as well as progressive ones) into genuinely "traditional" songs. That brings us to "Killemall", the domain of keyboardist and guitarist Brent Knopf, certainly talented, who stirs real emotion even within an atypical structure where the more anguished, sung passages alternate with gripping piano interplay and frantic drum runs (courtesy of Danny Seim), by now one of the trademarks of the Portland band. The setlist is almost entirely, and understandably, devoted to material from the latest album, but there's also room for a jolt from the past, with "Wet And Rustig" from "Friend And Foe", which earns a well-deserved ovation from the crowd. "Evil Bee" finally closes the set, which lasted about forty minutes, for a show that will certainly be remembered.

Now it's Tortoise's turn, a band fundamental to the Nineties thanks to albums like "Millions Now Living Will Never Die" from 1996, a true post-rock landmark. The setlist draws from the group's first three albums, the ones distributed in Europe by City Slang. They start strong right away with "Djed" - featuring a memorable drum entrance from John McEntire around the two-minute mark - an intricate, wide-ranging suite blending the most disparate influences: dub, free jazz, kraut-rock and avant-garde music. Tortoise's music could be described as a sort of technical, "cold" landing point stemming from American hardcore and British post-punk (the sounds the band members grew up listening to), passing through the decisive, slow-core experiences of bands like Slint. That's how we arrive, precisely, at post-rock, which here takes shape as a kind of purification and rarefaction, achieved through experimental exploration (also drawing on the Canterbury scene and German kraut-rock) of the more unruly impulses of Eighties music. Instruments change hands, as usual, among the members of this supergroup, while the songs fill the air of the theatre. From "TNT" they play "I Set My Face To The Hillside", which unfolds amid soft guitar and vibraphone notes; "Along The Banks", placed near the end of the show, almost seems to carry echoes of Morricone, while the sweetness of the first part of "Glass Museum" stirs real emotion before its furious conclusion; the audience, just as with Menomena, responds with enthusiasm.

Finally, at 11pm, the much-anticipated Broken Social Scene. They open with a classic: "KC Accidental", from the album that established them as one of the most important bands on the indie scene, "You Forgot It In People" from 2002. The instrumental section works brilliantly, with the guitar riff, played simultaneously by five guitarists, coming across as energetic as it needs to be. The sour notes, though - surprisingly - aren't long in coming: Kevin Drew's voice fails to cut through the song's dense sound, leaving a general sense of incompleteness. The following "Texico Bitches" doesn't win us over either. Ultimately, it's the band's latest album itself, "Forgiveness Rock Record", released this year, that failed to convince. Drew's voice could stand as a symbol, on this particular evening, of the Canadian group's apparent lack of inspiration, since it fails to give the songs a recognizable identity; in this sense, one feels the absence of real emotional depth beneath the meticulously polished (and usually interesting, if not overabundant) surface of the songs. But it's not all negative; the more distinctly pop, less ambitious leanings of "Cause = Time" and "Stars And Sons" go down well. Drew warmly wishes City Slang a happy birthday and then frequently breaks up the songs with words and remarks that don't always seem particularly on point, as has lately been the case with the Canadian ensemble's music. "World Sick", the opening track and by far the best thing on the latest album, also impresses live, and then the encore, which closes out this intense Saturday night of concerts, is reserved for the more mournful "Lover's Split".

We head out towards Friedrichstrasse, satisfied with the evening all the same. Broken Social Scene aren't failed outright, just given an incomplete: pleasant but shallow; Menomena's performance, however, was superb, and Tortoise's was rock-solid as always.

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