The hot buzz this week was Tuesday’s release by Vampire Weekend, entitled Vampire Weekend. This band has been getting serious buzz for the past 8 months or so, and it seems like this has been beneficial for them, as their tour opener was a sold out show at the Bowery Ballroom. Not an easy feat to sell out Bowery, let alone the 1st show of your first tour in support of your first album.
Now, being the responsible journalist that I am, I will weigh in my opinion on Vampire Weekend, based on my limited knowledge of the situation. For starters, I do not have the album. I have heard most of the songs in one capacity or another, and in that sense, I have to authority to make rash generalizations about this band. This is the angle I’m going for with the rest of my writings here at Shut Up and Dance.
First hearing the songs, I immediately thought Paul Simon’s Graceland sound, and then I watched some on their stuff on La Blogotheque (www.blogotheque.net) and they definitely have some post-punk influences. They’re not bad musicians, not in any sense, and live, they might even rock, but for me, the deal breaker is the lyrics. I mean they are SO pretentious, c’mon. These romanticized notions of industrial England or turn of the century New England is just absurd. What? You we’re English majors? Well GREAT. Guess what, I found most of the English majors at my college pretentious and obnoxious, what makes you think you're gonna be different? Hmm? The bottom line to me is that these guys play “Ear candy.” (NB -I came up with this term last night, and hope to expand on this soon.)
Talented? Yes. But there’s a huge leap artists must make to go from talented to, you know, the next level. I see their careers like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Debut album is the critics’ darling, tour the world for a year or too, plays major festivals (they already made Coachella), and then the second album comes out and everyone is disappointed. And they are disappointed because it wasn’t as good as the first. When in actuality, it is exactly the SAME as the first album, but because of the hype and the praise the first album received, they can’t live up to it. These guys have one sound, one style, which is fine, but I don’t see them deviating from the Afro-post-punk-pop equation they got going for them, so they’ll have that niche market covered. Unique? Check. Mind blowing. Not now, maybe with time; they are young.
Check ‘em out at Popscene tonight, for free no less, but keep in mind I won’t be going. Frankly, I was more excited to discover that a new season of Real World/ Road Rules Challenge, this time in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, has started. This year it is The Guantlet III: Rookies vs. Veterans. If this season isn’t the most extreme, gut-wrenching display of humanity, then I don’t know how civilization can be saved.
I will consider checking them (Vampire Weekend) out next time they swing through town March 22 and 23, as they will be hitting up the Independent and Rickshaw Stop.
Bonus Material-
The Complete Cast listing of ALL the Real World/Road Rules Challenges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_World_Road_Rules_Challenge
-Also-
I clicked next blog on the top of the page here and was brought to this. http://tonythebaker.blogspot.com/
I’m glad to know I’m in good company.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Last night I went to Bottom of the Hill(www.bottomofthehill.com) to see MGMT, Yeasayer, and the Morning Benders. This was the first show I went to since moving to San Francisco(NB- This is not technically correct, as I have actually seen three other live music performances over the past 2 weeks, but, last night’s show was the first where I bought tickets in advance and made a conscious effort to actually attend the show).
I guess I’ll just jump right into it. I got in the building after a 10 minute wait outside, which was not bad at all considering the show had been sold out for a week, maybe more. The club had a capacity of 249 people, and the Morning Benders were somewhere in the middle of their set. I had no idea who the Morning Benders were, and while eating dinner with friends prior to attending the show, nobody could say anything more than “MGMT, Yesayer, and some other band,” followed by somebody else remarking “There’s a third band?” and so forth.
To be honest, they were good, and I was really impressed by the tightness of the bass player and drummer really locking in, and I happened to notice the bass player had black X’s on his, which is another prop to him, to go with his fashion style of only buttoning the top button of his dress shirt. They had a Strokes-ish sound, consisting of two guitars, bass and drums, and even did a New Order cover. However, what collective talent the band had was lost on me by the snarkiness of the front man, who made multiple complaints about his monitors and comments to crowd about whether they were interested in dancing. Sorry DUDE, but you hit the lottery by getting this opening gig, probably several months ago, when half the crowd in attendance didn’t even know who MGMT or Yeasayer was. There are probably 300 bands in the Bay area with just as much talent who would be grateful to have your slot. Musically speaking though, these guys brought it.
Yeasayer was next, and I was really only familiar with this one song- Yeasayer- 2080
They had more or less a blank canvas of a fan to work with. Sonically, they reminded me a lot of Animal Collective, and their guitar player had eccentric, angular guitar riffs. The bass was too low in the mix to here at most points, and the drums had to have some effect on them, cause I was completely confused by what I was hearing on certain songs… in a good way.
My disappointment was that the front man looked down and to the side almost the whole set. I understand you guys are avant-garde Brooklyn musicians, I get it, but when you’ve been playing as much as these guys have recently (check out their tour schedule), I expect, nay, demand better stage presence. Bonus points for having a bass player who can be a part of the Social Scene whenever he wants, no questions asked, based on his appearance.
Which brings us to (dun… dun… dunnnnnnnn) the headlining act, MGMT( or management as I say- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGMT)
FULL DISCLAIMER- These guys are the reason I bought tickets for this show. I first heard some of their songs 3 months ago and soon after got a hold of the album, and the album is awesome. It easily made my top 10 albums list of 2007, assuming I have a top ten albums list of 2007. When a friend alerted me to their playing, we immediately got tickets.
Ok, to start things of MGMT is two guys, or at least, the album was. Now they have 3 other backing musicians. After the show, one person in my group made a comment how live, MGMT was more of a rock band. While this is a fair statement, I will say this. I DID NOT WANT A ROCK BAND. Oracular Spectacular has some of the catchiest dance songs I have heard, and all I can say about last nights’ performance was …meh. I don’t want to see white kids who went to an elite liberal arts college in Connecticut and do blow try to be a pseudo glam-rock band. I WANT INDIE DANCE PARTY, that’s what Oracular Spectacular is. I will admit the crowd was pretty dead, just a bunch of people standing there, checking out the hot new scene. The only point when it remotely resembled a good time was during the performance of “Kids” in which it was just the two main guys, accompanied by a backing track, and they only did the 1st verse and chorus before leaving as the music played.
Now, I’m not saying that they were bad, they weren’t, its just not what I was hoping for. I can say, in context, that for $8 and the $3 surcharge, the evening was worth it.
Some quotes from the evening:
“There was alot of reverb on their guitars”- G. McCann- in reference to MGMT
“You have a blog?” B. Mead- in reference to me claiming I will write a review on my blog
Bonus Material
Wow, now way, really, I woulda never thought it
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/29/people.spears.walters.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest
I guess I’ll just jump right into it. I got in the building after a 10 minute wait outside, which was not bad at all considering the show had been sold out for a week, maybe more. The club had a capacity of 249 people, and the Morning Benders were somewhere in the middle of their set. I had no idea who the Morning Benders were, and while eating dinner with friends prior to attending the show, nobody could say anything more than “MGMT, Yesayer, and some other band,” followed by somebody else remarking “There’s a third band?” and so forth.
To be honest, they were good, and I was really impressed by the tightness of the bass player and drummer really locking in, and I happened to notice the bass player had black X’s on his, which is another prop to him, to go with his fashion style of only buttoning the top button of his dress shirt. They had a Strokes-ish sound, consisting of two guitars, bass and drums, and even did a New Order cover. However, what collective talent the band had was lost on me by the snarkiness of the front man, who made multiple complaints about his monitors and comments to crowd about whether they were interested in dancing. Sorry DUDE, but you hit the lottery by getting this opening gig, probably several months ago, when half the crowd in attendance didn’t even know who MGMT or Yeasayer was. There are probably 300 bands in the Bay area with just as much talent who would be grateful to have your slot. Musically speaking though, these guys brought it.
Yeasayer was next, and I was really only familiar with this one song- Yeasayer- 2080
They had more or less a blank canvas of a fan to work with. Sonically, they reminded me a lot of Animal Collective, and their guitar player had eccentric, angular guitar riffs. The bass was too low in the mix to here at most points, and the drums had to have some effect on them, cause I was completely confused by what I was hearing on certain songs… in a good way.
My disappointment was that the front man looked down and to the side almost the whole set. I understand you guys are avant-garde Brooklyn musicians, I get it, but when you’ve been playing as much as these guys have recently (check out their tour schedule), I expect, nay, demand better stage presence. Bonus points for having a bass player who can be a part of the Social Scene whenever he wants, no questions asked, based on his appearance.
Which brings us to (dun… dun… dunnnnnnnn) the headlining act, MGMT( or management as I say- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGMT)
FULL DISCLAIMER- These guys are the reason I bought tickets for this show. I first heard some of their songs 3 months ago and soon after got a hold of the album, and the album is awesome. It easily made my top 10 albums list of 2007, assuming I have a top ten albums list of 2007. When a friend alerted me to their playing, we immediately got tickets.
Ok, to start things of MGMT is two guys, or at least, the album was. Now they have 3 other backing musicians. After the show, one person in my group made a comment how live, MGMT was more of a rock band. While this is a fair statement, I will say this. I DID NOT WANT A ROCK BAND. Oracular Spectacular has some of the catchiest dance songs I have heard, and all I can say about last nights’ performance was …meh. I don’t want to see white kids who went to an elite liberal arts college in Connecticut and do blow try to be a pseudo glam-rock band. I WANT INDIE DANCE PARTY, that’s what Oracular Spectacular is. I will admit the crowd was pretty dead, just a bunch of people standing there, checking out the hot new scene. The only point when it remotely resembled a good time was during the performance of “Kids” in which it was just the two main guys, accompanied by a backing track, and they only did the 1st verse and chorus before leaving as the music played.
Now, I’m not saying that they were bad, they weren’t, its just not what I was hoping for. I can say, in context, that for $8 and the $3 surcharge, the evening was worth it.
Some quotes from the evening:
“There was alot of reverb on their guitars”- G. McCann- in reference to MGMT
“You have a blog?” B. Mead- in reference to me claiming I will write a review on my blog
Bonus Material
Wow, now way, really, I woulda never thought it
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/29/people.spears.walters.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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