I saw Ladytron last night at the Fabulous Commodore Ballroom. I ended up going by myself, and while I wouldn’t do that regularly, I kind of enjoyed it — just sitting with a drink and doing some people watching. I don’t know if it’s the loud music, or the alcohol, or something about being in a crowd, but I can really get some serious thinking done. In fact, I made my decision to move to Vancouver at the bar of an industrial club in Toronto in 2001 and decided on my MSc thesis topic at an Amon Tobin show.
Oh, and Ladytron was okay.
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Went to Zulu tonight and got my ticket to TV on the Radio. Last one they had. Based on their new album (deliciously named compactedly Return to Cookie Mountain), TV on the Radio has gone from a group I was barely interested in to one I’m really excited about seeing!
Here they are rocking Dave and Paul (thanks to Gillian for the link).
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Seeing Cat Power is an experience. If for some reason you don’t know her, Cat Power is Chan Marshall, famously neurotic singer-songwriter behind some of the most soulful and beautiful Southern-gothic-flavored indie ballads of the past decade.
She played a long, spare solo set without a backing band or opening act, accompanying herself on guitar or piano or sometimes just singing a capella. She stopped in the middle of songs to complain about the sound or tell jokes or take cigarette breaks, she forgot the words to some of her own songs, and one time just walked off stage (she came back, though I’ve heard sometimes she doesn’t). Turns out when you can sing with such an achingly beautiful voice, people will put up with a lot of eccentricities.
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Last night the Orpheum turned, for an evening, into the land of the Chuck Taylors for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The trio was joined by the first opener, Dave Burke-impersonator Imaad Wasif, who played his rather excellent set alone with his guitar and some kind of drone box electrothingee. He has gotta rank as one of the more humble performers I’ve seen, mumbling appreciation of the quiet audience between his songs.
The second opening act, Blood on the Wall — um… wow. I guess being from Williamsburg is now enough to qualify you to start a band and open for the Yeahs. Because it sure wasn’t musicianship, songwriting or stage presence. As Gillian said, for three bucks you can see better bands in Saskatchewan. Needless to say, Pitchfork Media loves ’em (or so the 8.1 rating suggests; the review itself seems to be a bunch of random sentence fragments from the author’s diary).
The YYYs were great though. Karen O came on stage with an ear-to-ear grin, a Renaissance squire costume, and a stiff-legged bounce, the sum of which made her seem like a particularly musical marionette. She ripped through a high-energy set, singing, whispering and screaming, and it’s obvious she loves to perform — everything you want and need in a punk-glam frontwoman. I’m sure she was a handful for her parents.
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