Occasionally I get sent mail from bands who want me to review their stuff, or embed their video or say nice things about them for some reason. I don’t often do it because on the whole, they are depressingly boring.
But yesterday I got an email that contained this…
We made the video ourselves and it’s basically a battle between a robot and a wizard (homemade costumes). In the video there are fireballs, russian roulette, sword fights, massages, a dog with a cape, breakfast etc…..
It’s actually pretty badass!
And I knew I was onto a winner. I love the fact that they follow ‘a dog with a cape, breakfast’ with ‘etc’ – Yeah, that’s right you know, dogs with capes, early morning meals, the usual, you can sort of guess what’s next… Brilliant.
This came from a genuinely delightful indie pop band Hotel St. George
I checked out the video. It did indeed include all the aforementioned stuff and defiantly rates as ‘badass’ The video reminds me of staying up til 3AM watching videos on MTV2 to try and find something new to impress my friends with.
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.
