Video: Tim & Eric SNL Opening
Last Night: Sundelles / Oberhofer / The Soft Pack
Alright, I'm a bit rusty from not writing all that much, but here goes.
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Believe it or not, I'd never actually been to Bowery Ballroom until last night. Turned out to be an amazingly beautiful venue - it's no surprise that people love it so much.
I came in during the middle of Sundelles' set. They're basically par for the course in terms of lo-fi garage, but with a bit of the beach rock everyone seems to be so into these days. I was one of the only people standing near the stage while they were playing, which probably prompted the huge high five I got from the lead singer at the end of the night.
Oberhofer
The second band on the bill was Oberhofer, a Brooklyn based four piece fronted by Brad Oberhofer, a nineteen year old from Tacoma. They were great - definitely my favorite act of the night. Super pop-rock and rad guitar playing. Pretty much all of their recorded music is available for free, so get on that, because I can barley describe it in words. See them live, too - they're playing around New York and supporting the Morning Benders all over the country and in Canada as well.
The Soft Pack
Finally around 11:30 or so, The Soft Pack came on to a pretty full house of New Jersey boys and thirty year old men - not a single hipster to be seen! They did their thing pretty well with hardly any banter and it wasn't too loud. It wasn't super memorable either, and they didn't play an encore. They did play Mexico (which is my favorite song), but it sounded a bit weird. That was disappointing. I moved out of the bro-mosh-dance pit in the front to stand with friends on the side and still had a great view of the stage, though.
All and all it was a pretty fun night, but it was really Oberhofer that made it for me.
(Sorry Layne. I hope you still love me.)
The Wilderness Downtown ft. Arcade Fire
Google teamed up with filmmaker Chris Milk and Arcade Fire to create The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive video that combines the technology of HTML5, Google Maps and the new Google Chrome browser.
Viewers enter their home address, and the video that follows "takes you down memory lane through the streets you grew up in", writes Aaron Koblin on a Google Creative Lab blog post.
The project features the song We Used to Wait by Arcade Fire.
Start your trip here.
Are You There?
There are a thousand ways to begin a post about Joaquin Phoenix these days. Just look at him. Just look at how he's been for awhile now. He's out of it, constantly disheveled and, well, not here.
Or maybe it's all an ongoing, mystifying and bizarre publicity stunt.
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Just as a side note, what a gorgeous poster. The color scheme, which looks like it was inspired by Joaquin's signature ombre shades, is ironically soft and very pretty. Additionally, this really solidifies all-caps, italic Georgia as a current typography trend.
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Anyway. Sometime last year, Joaquin's brother-in-law (and one of my absolute favorite people) Casey Affleck began to follow him around with a documentary crew. At the time, this came off as another plea for attention; a joke. And then they both dropped off the radar. Until now.
The film, which is Casey's directorial debut, is slated for September 10th.
Summertime
I threw up a post this time last year about summer '09 up-and-comers The Drums and Best Coast. Sure enough, it's been an eventful year, and both groups have enjoyed quite a bit of success.
New York locals The Drums came out with their self-titled LP sometime earlier this summer. It's a really enjoyable album. While their previous releases may have type-casted them as a 'summer only' band, this release manages to maintain their surf rock aesthetic without going overboard.
They're about to go out on a tour with Surfer Blood.
I hear they're a great live.
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After taking Bethany and her lo-fi beach songs a la carte for the past year, she and the rest of her Best Coast have finally come up with full-lengh Crazy for You. The whole thing is packed with a load of catchy, 60s inspired lovesick songs. And I stress lovesick. If you've got some recently heartbroken friends, shy away from giving them this album. Although the tracks are generally pretty light sounding, the lyrics are, erm, sorta sad.
She did a collab with Converse as well, just like Julian Casablancas did last year with Santogold and Pharrell. This time around, Beth teamed up with (my favorite) Vampire Weekender Rostam and Kid Cudi. They came up with All Summer, a predominantly Best Coast-y track.
A neat video comes with it:
Download the song at converse.com.
Like When You
Despite the fact that I'm bound by legal contract to love everything Born Ruffians will ever put out, their newest offering Like When You is one seriously awesome track. It's the b-side for Nova-Leigh, the second single from their sophomore album Say It.
After a 40 second Animal Collective-esque intro, some painfully nostalgic, rolling guitar riffs poke through the sax-and-synth. I'm going to go ahead and liken this to the soft opening bars of John Mayer's No Such Thing, a song I basically worshipped when I was twelve (that would explain the nostalgia). After this, the track takes on a very sweet sounding life of its own over the base riff, mixing a strong bass line, double vocals and interestingly placed rests. And the production, which was most likely done by Rusty Santos, really couldn't be more perfect.
Lyrically, it's pretty much a mystery what's going on. Something about love and two tickets to Mexico. Luke took his creative genius and 1,000 octave range and just ran with slurring a lion's share of the words, per usual. While the band usually takes some heat for this, I think it's pretty neat, because it forces you to actually listen to the music. The lyrics are another dimension.
Since I very rarely never write this much about a single song, you best be slappin' on some headphones and listening to it asap. Despite its b-side status, I really hope lots of people get to hear it. And that they're rehearsing it for the fall tour...yeah, that's not going to happen. But still!
Soak Up "Congratulations" with MGMT
I confess to shying away from listening to Congratulations, MGMT's follow-up to the surprise hit debut Oracular Spectacular, for two reasons. First, I never got into said debut. Second goes out to pretentiously not wanting to listen to 'mainstream-indie' music. My mistake.
MGMT basically had two choices when it was time to approach LP2. They could continue making radio-friendly songs that everyone wanted to hear despite the fact that they didn't really believe in them, or they could go off in a totally different direction. Either way, their fanbase was destined to be split. It's true of pretty much all groups that have achieved similar debut success. They tank if they carbon copy the first one. They tank with fans of the debut if they go off in a different direction.
Lucky for me and fans of well-crafted art rock, MGMT decided to go against the grain. Congratulations amazingly produced (which is why they don't translate well live), lyrically interesting, sonically coherent and overall a great package - much better than the topical pop Oracular gave us. Unfortunately, the general consumer doesn't have enough patience for an LP like this, or a beautiful track like Siberian Breaks, the 12 minute long album centerpiece. Those people will be hopefully be appeased (seriously!) by poppier tracks like Brian Eno and Song for Dan Treacy, but even at that, they don't really match the danceability of their previous hits. I don't mind this at all. But then again, I love it when 'loud' artists do softer tracks (ex. Arctic Monkeys' 505; Young Rival's The Ocean, Soft Pack's Mexico, Tokyo Police Club's Swedes in Stockholm).
There's plenty more to say, but I'll end it here:
It seems like there will always be a part of their fanbase that will never be thrilled in the least by this gem of a recording and in turn lost, but that's the price MGMT (probably happily) pays for musically taking the direction they'd like to.
"All is well if the ticket sells."
Welcome to Daytrotter
Here's a trailer for an upcoming doc about the fabulous blog/recording studio Daytrotter.
Take a look!
Last Weekend: Born Ruffians
(Commence very poorly written, emotionally-charged post)
Last weekend was one of the craziest, most fun and most memorable weekends I've ever had. It started with me buying a ticket to see Born Ruffians on June 19th in March, which turned out to be a two-fold problem. First off, they were too kind to put me on some sort of permanent guest list for running their fansite, so I didn't need a ticket. Second, it turned out to be on the same day as my graduation. I had already missed their first 2010 New York show, and there was no way I was going to skip another.
So after a lot of thought (sitting, feeling conflicted in the park on Mulberry & Spring) I decided that I was going to race to the venue after graduation and come back in time for a huge party my school was giving that ran from 11-5.30a.
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Show One: New York, Santos Party House.
I came into the venue about 3/4 of the way through Young Rival's set. The place wasn't packed, so I just walked up to the second row of people. By the time Born Ruffians came on, the venue had filled up. They played a fantastic set, lots of stuff from their great new album SAY IT...this was probably the tightest of all eight shows I've seen them play and definitely my favorite gig. Everyone was really into it - lots of dancing and singing along.
The best part of the show (for me) was when the bassist, Mitch, who is the band's webmaster and the person I've been mostly communicating with dedicated Higher & Higher to me, presumably because there's a line from said song quoted on the fansite. He said, "This one's for Julia", which provoked the whole venue to start chanting Juuuuulia, Juuuulia. It was surreal and probably one of the cooler moments I've experienced.
After the show, I met Andy, the touring keyboard player for the first time and caught up with Mitch and the lead singer Luke. It was also great to meet Teri, a person who I've gotten to know through trading comments on BR's social media sites. After awhile, Luke was pointing me out to people who mentioned my fansite, so we (me & Teri, that is) met lots of internet friends as well.
The only photo from New York:
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The next day I headed to Boston, where I was on the guest list for their sold out show at Great Scott, which was by far the hottest/most poorly ventilated venue I've ever been in.
Young Rival came on around 10 and played garage rock for 40 minutes or so. They had a couple of good tunes. Check out The Ocean and Just Can't Stay Here.
Born Ruffians came on to a moshing crowd but still played solidly nonetheless (not as tight as New York, though). They stayed on well past midnight. During the encore, the drummer, Steve, gave me a shout-out, which went something like this (I have a terrible word memory): There's someone very special to us here tonight, her name is Julia (lifts drumstick in my general direction), and she runs our fansite..Fuck...Yeah..Born..Ruffians, which is way cooler than anything we've ever done online. Round of applause for Julia...thank you. I was standing right in front of him, so I smiled at him as the people who were standing around me were flashing thumbs up and bro-pushing me. This was mildly embarrassing, as I dislike being the center of attention, but still really cool.
After their set, Steve jumped down to talk to me, and told me that we'd never actually met, which was surprisingly true. We shook hands and hung out for awhile, and he said some very nice things. He gave me a shirt and got everyone to sign a vinyl for me. We talked to John from YR at the merch table about websites and headed to the back of the venue. I chatted with Luke about college and he suggested that we all take a picture together. Around the same time, Steve was shirtless and playing Andy's keyboard to some reggae song that was on the PA as Aron from YR grinded with him, which was hilarious. Mitch took a picture and Luke told me to put that one up on the website.
Here's the picture from Mitch's Tour Blog.
Anyway I can't wait to see them again in the fall, when they'll be headlining Bowery Ballroom and playing The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. Woo!
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