The Muslims are exceeding my expectations at the moment.
They’re playing tonight at 8 p.m. at Bowery Ballroom. Thanks Matt B. for the hot tips. That’s two for two!
I might hit this up before Glasslands tonight:
I’ve been enjoying this guy’s mixes of African pop music from the ’70s for weeks.
Plus, before that (also at Santos Party House), there’s a dub showcase with Ari-Up & the True Warriors, Meta & the Cornerstones, The Cool & Deadly, 77Klash, and The Fear Nuttin Band. I saw Ari-Up (of the Slits) do a dub set a few years ago that was kind of weird in a not-good way, but if I remember correctly, that was just her and her son and like a boombox or something. This time she has a band.
Filed under: Etc. | Tags: Adult, Decampment, Electric Six, Formula 409, laundry
The past month has been nuts. Among other things, I was helping prepare for this:
That’s my dear friend Kate on the left, and you may be familiar with Dick Valentine of Electric Six on the right.
Speaking of that band, about which I claim no journalistic objectivity, below is a sort-of recent video for “Formula 409.” At a barbecue last summer, DV shared the concept for the video — the band gets abducted by lizards — and the obvious question of, “How are you going to pull that off?” was raised. His answer: “Lizard costumes.”
Thank you Katherine, maid of good times, for the wedding photo.
In other music/film/video news, I totally missed the screening of Adult.’s Decampment last week at Anthology Film Archives. If you live in L.A., you can see it Nov. 18 at The Silent Movie Theatre. Either way, the trailer is pretty sweet.
So is their new video for “Inside.”
Actually, the main reason I’m bringing this blog back from the dead is to tell you about this. I’m going to be writing about some CMJ stuff for am/fm this week, and I’ll post it all here, too.
Tonight, however, my laundry situation has gotten desperate, so no shows. … But stay tuned, I plan on checking out So Percussion (is that a play on “so pretentious” — awesome) at Glasslands tomorrow, and if by some miracle I get released from work early, my old pal City Center on Friday.
Oh! And friends of BOX, on Saturday, our illustrious art director, Kelli Miller, will be at Vertexlist, 138 Bayard St. in Williamsburg, from 7-10 p.m. for an opening of her show along with Noah Loesberg. She’ll be screening her video, “The True Believer,” alongside a pile of hefty crystals and some works on paper. You should go! Who doesn’t love hefty crystals?!
Filed under: Writing | Tags: Baltimore, Brooklyn Vegan, CMJ, Jens Lekman, Ponytail, Shearwater
(This post originally ran on amNewYork’s am/fm blog, and can be found here.)
All summer I kept hearing about how great this Baltimore band was, and I had several opportunities to see them, seeing as how they’ve played more of our city’s all-ages spaces, and at a greater frequency, than most of the locals.
But it wasn’t until last night at the band’s CMJ showcase at Music Hall of Williamsburg that I finally stopped stalking them on MySpace and experienced their punk-spazz-whiplash in the flesh. And lucky for me, they were the meat between the bread that apparently most of the sold-out crowd was there to see (secret guests Shearwater and Jens Lekman, who, according to comments on Brooklyn Vegan, performed an “awkward” singing DJ set at 11 p.m. — I am old and was asleep by then), so I easily got a sweet spot right up front for Ponytail’s 9:30 p.m. set.
Picking up breadcrumbs along the tribal-ecstatic-electric track of late ’90s/early ’00s Providence noise, The Greatest City in America (best motto ever!) has been graduating its own class of the art-school-town sound for some time now. And this four-piece (2 guitars + 1 drums + 1 wickedly possessed voice) quickly seized the attention of pretty much everyone in the packed room. Especially those with a fondness for the heavy hum and cascading rhythmic quality of several helicopters lifting off at once, layered and looped over a steady, tribal beat. And when you’re blessed with a rebel wail like little Molly Siegel’s, I can’t imagine a better career path than joining a band. Near the end of the set, when she crawled and rolled around grasping the edge of the stage like a rabid mongoose, I was sold.
No worries if you missed it, though. Like I said earlier, they’re always here: Next up in our parts are two shows on Friday — Levi’s Fader Fort (169 Bowery) at 4:30 with Crystal Antlers and the Todd P/Ground Control Part at Market Hotel (1142 Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn) and then on Halloween, they’re playing Todd P’s NYC Big Halloween Bash with DMBQ, The Homosexuals and AIDS Wolf at Danbro Studios Warehouse (268 Meserole St., Brooklyn).
These guys were at the same show. Check out the singer’s shirt!
