Jenny Owen Youngs @ Bowery Ballroom NYC

I came to see Jenny Owen Youngs, but the other bands kicked a lot of ass in their own rights. The show opened with a band called These United States. These boys are fun Fun FUN!!! they opened their set with some monster guitars and killer bass, and followed immediately with the most kick ass drums I've heard all year on such a modest set-up. The music is kinda bluesy, kinda rock & roll-ish, 100% kick ass with a side of down home goodness and foot stomping. Let me put it like this, if the new season of True Blood on HBO opened with These United States playing in a bar on the bayou and followed with vampiric goodness and mayhem, I wouldn't be a bit surprised; and these fellas would not be a bit out of place. Usually, an opening act is pretty good, but you'd much rather be watching/listening to whatever band you really came to see. In this case, when the boys announced their last song, the entire room was all, "Nooooooooooooo!!!...but we do want to see Jenny. But still...Noooooooooooooooo!!!" For those that have only heard them, I must point out that bass player, Mark Charles, is one of the best dressed men in music right now. Period. Also, front man, Jesse Elliott, is the sweatingest man in music, and that is a fact. This man sweated more than all the other performers in all the other acts combined. He took one for the team. He was sweating on everyone's behalf. Seriously, I was in the front with my camera praying that he wouldn't shake his head in my direction. Sweat dripping from his guitar! Rounding out the foursome is J. Tom Hnatow who was wicked on the steel guitar and slide, David Strackany who worked it out on electric guitar, and drummer Robby Cosenza (who played nearly the entire set with his eyes closed - love this guy!). But I digress...please find their myspace and show them some love.

Jenny stepped up next. To say that Jenny Owen Youngs is extremely talented would be an understatement at the very least. Of course, when talking about her spectacular new cd, Transmitter Failure, she, herself, would probably be more likely to tell you that "...the packaging is beautiful! The music's okay..." Jenny rocked, rolled, folk'd,and joked her way through a nearly hour-long set, playing mostly new songs with a few solid assists from the first album. The show opener, Voice On Tape (from Jenny's debut, Batten The Hatches), got a huge crowd response...followed by an almost solemn hush as everyone leaned in and listened intently. The live version does not pale in the least to the album version with recorded voicemail snippets from Jenny's old college chum, Regina Spektor. Jenny was joined on this leg of the tour by Dan Romer on guitar, Chris Kuffner on bass, Elliott Jacobson on drums, and someone whom Jenny described as "...Destroyer of worlds, breaker of hearts, and my favorite part of the band Tegan & Sara...", Bess Rogers on guitar. Since the new album was just released officially the day before this show, the new songs were a pleasant and very welcome surprise to nearly everyone in the room. The driving force behind newer songs like Led To The Sea, Dissolve, and Clean Break definitely left a stamp of "Mission Accomplished" on Jenny's mission while writing and recording the album, which was to bring a collection of songs that would be more fun to perform live. They got the crowd moving, head nodding, dancing to the beat, and singing along to the chorus after not too long. Nods to Batten The Hatches were the afore mentioned Voice On Tape, Drinking Song, and everyone's favorite, F*ck Was I. My personal favorite off the new album performed during the show was the title track, Transmitter Failure which, in my opinion, is the most melodically beautiful song Jenny's recorded so far. This is no small feat from a woman who can make you sing the words "What the f*ck was I thinking..." absentmindedly in a room full of small children before you catch yourself and look around to see if anybody heard you (I'm not saying it's happened to me, but I'm not saying it hasn't either...). Catchy melody is clearly her thang! Transmitter Failure (the song and the album) has so many layers. Performed live it is stripped down to its bare essentials and it is after the big, thrashy guitar opening comes to an abrupt halt that you have to hold your breath so you don't miss out on Jenny softly singing the verses and chorus. By the time the end of the song comes around and the guitars and drums are going at full force again while Jenny sings serenely over the entire arrangement, you're not ready for it all to dissolve into the near silence of the last lone note. It's a breathtaking performance live, and its only improvement on the recorded version is the addition of a string quartet to round out the lushness of the sound. Beautiful. She followed this up with a lovely rendition of Nighty Night, and finished big and raucously loud with Last Person. The only thing that could have made this a better show would have been if Jenny closed the show instead of being sandwiched between These United States and Jukebox The Ghost. There's really no room for name chanting and encore songs when another band is waiting to go on stage....*sigh*

If you told me that Jukebox the Ghost was the mastermind behind the vampire puppet opera in the film "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", I would totally believe you. The movie's leading man, Jason Segel, keeps insisting that he actually wrote all of those songs though, so you'll just have to check out Jukebox the Ghost live in concert to see why I'm drawing parallels between that film and this music. Pretty much every song they played sounded like something from some gothic puppet opera. This was helped along by the chatty lead-ins to the songs ("This one is about what the world is like if you're coming from underground after the apocalypse and seeing the planet again for the first time..."). The harmonies are sublime. The falsettos are BeeGees-era goodness. This is a live show you don't want to miss.

Here's a clip of Jenny performing "If I Didn't Know" live at the show.



And here's Jenny performing "F*ck Was I" live at the show...enjoy!

See you at the next show...