The Lux Tour seamlessly merges ballet, opera and classical music (featuring a 20-or-so-piece orchestra on the floor of the Garden!) with pop-star spectacle and charisma. Rosalía’s dancing pivots gracefully among various styles, and her vocals are virtuosic in any genre. But what has stuck with me most in the days since the show is sus ojos: I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another musician on an arena stage who is able to convey such strong emotion through her eyes. They sparkled darkly, they glared with ferocity and, during her showstopping aria in “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” they brimmed over with tears. They also rolled ever-so-sassily during her playfully staged performance of this “Lux” standout, a kiss-off to an ex-lover that Rosalía introduces each night by inviting an audience member (usually a celebrity) onstage to spill their secrets in a Catholic confessional booth.
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One Excellent Discovery
The Student Teachers: “Past Tense”
Another fun thing I did last week was catch a screening of Philip Hartman’s great 1987 cult classic “No Picnic,” a restoration of which is currently playing to packed rooms at Film Forum. (It was supposed to run for a week but has now been held over for more than two months! That’s what I call an underground hit.) “No Picnic” is a beautifully shot, stylishly written time capsule of mid-1980s New York: rent strikes in the East Village, subterranean bars entered through sidewalk cellar doors, and (in a memorable scene seemingly shot surreptitiously from the stands of Shea Stadium) Keith Hernandez playing first base for the New York Mets. And fittingly, since the protagonist is a down-and-out jukebox repair man, it has a killer soundtrack, featuring Richard Hell (who makes a cameo in a role he was born to play: “Irate Neighbor”), the Raunch Hands and a band I was not familiar with until I saw the movie, the Student Teachers, a short-lived teenage new-wave group who met at a John Cale concert and played all those storied downtown New York clubs in the late 1970s. Shout-out to the person in the YouTube comments on the “No Picnic” trailer who identified this song that plays in it; I love that opening riff!
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Two New Songs I’m Digging
Sylvan Esso: “Hot Slob”
I had no idea the serenely blippy electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso could sound like this: sweaty, snotty and hedonistically brash. “Hot Slob,” a new stand-alone single, is an infectious and defiant ode to living messily and having nothing figured out: “And I drink like a fish, I still don’t know how to live,” Amelia Meath sings. “But I made it, can you hear it? Yeah, I’m living in the glitch.”
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Julia Jacklin: “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)”
Julia Jacklin, an Australian singer-songwriter with three incisive albums under her belt, has returned with this jangly and buoyant lead single from her upcoming LP “The Gem.” Recommended if you like: Sharon Van Etten, self-deprecating self-knowledge, song titles that make excellent use of parentheses. (Yes, there’s an Amplifier playlist about that, too.)
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Two Head-Spinning Hitchcockian Oddities
I recently finished (and loved) Steven C. Smith’s book “Hitchcock and Herrmann,” a lively and detailed study of the working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, who probably gets my vote for greatest film composer of all time. Smith’s research gave me a new appreciation for Herrmann’s scores (he wrote seven of them for Hitchcock movies), but it also pointed me toward an absurd bit of Hitchcock musical ephemera that I didn’t previously know about but with which I’ve since become obsessed: The incongruously cheery theme song written for “Vertigo.”
