Tonight’s sparse crowd isn’t helped by The Lexington’s weird décor – a mix of Auntie Mabel wallpaper and Bowells of a Steam Ship that still manages to boast a decent stage area and a thunderous PA playing Devo –certainly enough to engage our hipster radars from the get-go.
Plenty of pre-gig buggering about on our part means we miss openers Grave Architects, (but check ‘em out here anyway!) so are initially put in a bad mood by the trying too hard indie antics of Lost Infantry.
First rule of stagecraft: Treat the audience like the dogs they are. They aren’t interested in your in-jokes and self effacing banter. Second rule? Well, not mixing Yes guitar lines with a Dexy’s influence is probably a good one…
Google is all powerful! It knows who you are, where you live and what you watch when you’re jerking off. Luckily there’s still a way for rock n’ roll to stick it to the man – even a man that will happily make naked ladies appear on your screen whenever you like – form a band even the big G can’t track down! DT ignores the spellcheck and checks ‘em out:
Probably the defining American indie band of the 90’s – Pavement – have reformed to play a gig in Central Park in 2010.
Pavement released a string of albums through the 90’s that formed the soundtrack to tight t shirts, roll up cigarettes, fanzines and dancing while looking at your own feet. Good to have them back. Let’s hope their fans leave the tight t shirts in the cupboard though.
What you see above is a band who are either very, very clever or monumentally thick. Thick to the point of non-functional. So thick, in fact, that they cease to function as normal humans and simply begin to mill around making grunting noises, dribbling and, in this lots’ case, styling their hair.
Puck are obviously a band who have worked hard on their sound, for a demo this is super slick with a solid, clear production that showcases frontlady AmyJay’s soaring vocals. If anything however, this could be as much a problem as a bonus. Things start promisingly enough, with a chunky, stonery riff introducing opener”Fly”. Once those vocals kick in however, the heavy edge quickly rubs off. I’ve mentioned the slick production, and combined with the high end vox there’s a definite touch of 80s and early 90s rock to this, Heart and Vixen springing to mind (and bizarrely, the fictional Tia Carrera fronted band from “Wayne’s World”!).
