Tune-Yards @ 9:30 Club - 5/21/2018
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Tune-Yards @ 9:30 Club - 5/21/2018

Merrill Garbus has a lot on her mind these days, and her sound is changing as a result of it. I can feel you creep into my private life is a rumination of white privilege and the divided state of America. While Garbus and newly-official bandmate Nate Brenner have done a very admirable job in calling out injustices in their previous work (like with “Gangsta” and “My Country”), they set out to confront their privilege head-on and in doing so created the most focused work of their career. (You can listen to our podcast episode on I can feel you creep into my private life here.)

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An awesome bomb in your brain: tUnE-YarDs @ The Red Palace - 5/19/11

See that smile to the right there? Well that's what the tUnE-Yards show (damn that's hard to type) on Thursday at The Red Palace was all about. The absolute exuberance and joyfulness of tUne-YarDs alter-ego, Merrill Garbus is hinted at on her butt-shaking, brain-breaking 2011 album whokill, but unleashed on stage it was as infectious as it was endearing.

Garbus isn't making what you would call easy music these days. Her songs are full of crashing conflicting chords laid down over polyrhythmic beats that slip in and out of the music all the while her voice perfoming acrobatics rarely attempted in the pop music sphere, much less pulled off. whokill, her latest album, is a hard, at times brain-breakingly genius record that takes more than a few listens to quite get, and even then it takes a few more before you become completely at ease with it. But once it opens up even some of its secrets to you, it's the most rewarding album that you'll hear all year. So how does it play live?...

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