Sarahindie

We arrive in time for a band that I think is Harvard. (Dear promoters, if you want me to see all your openers, then schedule them so I can get out of work and still get dinner before the show.) They have the mumbley delivery and electronic beat of early decade hipster favorites like Piebald and Minus the Bear, but with way heavier guitars (possibly pasted in from a Mars Volta album). I had heard mixed things about them, but I like this sort of thing. These sorts of things. Whatever. It is hot as balls down here. Unfortunately, the songs often devolve into noodly guitars and chaos. The last song begins with noodling and chaos, so I’m lost before I am found. You can just imagine how it ends. A girl I presume to be the hottest band member’s girlfriend (hottest band member’s girlfriend sells the merch) is standing on a chair behind the merch table and dancing. She gets down during this song.

This feels like the most professional gig I’ve seen Empires play outside Chicago! It gives me hope. Also, Allison corroborates a popular theory when she says “Everyone involved with them is hot.” (The actual theory is that band leader Tom Conrad has no ugly friends.) I especially dig how bassist Connor Doyle is dressed as though he’s on summer break from Harvard in 1963. Super dapper.

I think the girl in front of me has a A Perfect Circle tattoo. Need to google that when I get home.

I won’t lie, I’ve heard singer Sean Van Vleet sound better. But considering that they’ve been touring pretty much uninterrupted for five or six weeks, he’s in great nick. Plus, he does this amazing thing. Instead of just being scratchy or unable to hit a note, he has this built-in vibrato. Also, it is so hot in here, that halfway through the set, the guitarists start to droop like the twentieth hour of a Depression dance-a-thon. But they keep trying! This money will be so important to their families! Like, ok, I do Excel for a living. I sit at a desk with a Nalgene full of water. And if it were this hot at my desk, I would go home in a tiff. The fact that they can still flail and give 110% is unbelievable. I need to sit down.

P.S. to Mom: I forgot to concert call, but they all want me to apologize to you about Sunday!

The Vibe Lounge is not a particularly odd venue, as Empires/Long Island venues go. What is odd is that this is a matinee. Doors opened at 3. But it is directly across from the train station, so totally handy for me! And the pre-band music is the new leaked Gaslight album.

There are maybe 40 people here, one boy. Wait! Two. But I think they were in an earlier band. The bands before Empires seemed to be approximately 15. We sat outside and watched a band’s dad come to pick them up.

Oh God, it is so hot in here. The band that was supposed to play before Empires never showed. So Empires has some time to futz around on stage waiting for their set time. The kids in the back on the lounge couches are playing Uno. I might play Yahtzee on my phone.

I love the point during setup when drummer Ryan Luciani takes his shoes off. That’s how I drive!

In the first song, wild, unpredictable and insanely talented touring bassist Connor Doyle jumps onto one of the stage’s little steps and rock out so hard that he breaks his guitar strap. By the end of the first song, I can tell that at this, the last show of the tour, they are going to rock their balls off. I don’t have much in the way of notes because I was dancing until I was drenched with sweat. I haven’t done that in years.

The bouncer comes down and rocks the eff out. I have never seen that happen before.

Before the encore, tourmates TV TV bring a round of whiskey shots onstage. I love the last nights of tours.

After the amazing, energetic, wild set, we need to decamp outside to cool down. TV TV’s Josh Ocean comes over to berate us for not having stayed for his set once on this tour. Guilty as charged, so we head back inside.

There’s something about their second song that reminds me of the hardcore glam-metal sound of the 90s (Marilyn Manson? Trent Reznor? Can’t figure it out.) The rest of their set is whatever we’re calling pop-punk now, but without being so deeply … upsetting. (Misogynist, untalented, date rapey.) They seem like genuinely nice guys, unlike current pop-punk darlings All Time Low and Boys Like Girls, to name a few. Some random juicehead in sunglasses gets up on the raised step of the stage and just watches from there.

Vibe Lounge protip: The bathrooms are air conditioned. Blissful.

Afterwards, we run into half of Empires at the tasty nearby MacArthur Park bar and can buy them a celebratory drink before they get back on the road for four days off, then another tour, this time with another set of NYC local boys: Lights Resolve. If they’re coming anywhere near you, GO!!!

Rae and I talk about starting a blog to showcase the terrible venues we’ve been in. There will be a special post for Hangar 84. Continue reading

Okay, look kids, I’m gonna level with you. February is kicking my ass. I got a sinus infection, for starters, and the medication is making me hella loopy. I’ve been sick for about two weeks. I have all of these notes to share with you about Empires’ trip through the east coast, and that is forthcoming, but in the meantime, go buy their new awesome single, “Strangers” (or at least click over to listen to it). Their album, Bang, is going to be pretty epic. Then, as if that wasn’t hanging over me, I dragged myself out for the Motion City Soundtrack show only to promptly spill Robitussin on my trusty liveblogging phone and utterly destroy it. So that is lost to time. (Summary: like all MCS shows, Katie ended up Mom-ing a mosh pit. And they brought an a capella group from Williams College to sing one of their songs in the encore.)

So, Katie suggested that I do a sort of Motion City roundup with my thoughts on the show and their new album, My Dinosaur Life, and other stuff. But you guys, I am just barely managing to make myself meals at this point (lunch yesterday? half a bowl of Lucky Charms aka all the Lucky Charms we had left). So instead, I give you the things I was going to talk about.

1. Click the link above and go to Lala.com and listen to the most adorably geeky band in emodom. Their songs are angsty, yes, but also punk in a very Midwestern way and speaking to a life much closer to the one I’ve lived than the epic tales of betrayal and sluttiness shared by Fall Out Boy or Panic! at the Disco. These are songs about how you’ll totally give up your X-Box if that’s what it takes to bring her back, and who can’t relate to that? (Besides my mom.)
2. They did an Interface session at Spinner and it will give you a taste of them live and their intense adorability. They seem like the kind of dudes that would be in your after work beer aficionados club/D&D party.
3. They made the following video. They seem to think it sucks, but I do not. I think it will probably be my favorite video of the year, and it’s only February.

The White Stripes, White Blood Cells: Before Jack White dedicated himself full-time to being weird and the Stripes became a noise band (honestly, you guys, Meg’s getting worse), they were America’s finest crafters of epic rock. And this is their magnum opus. It’s ambitious, and it succeeds. Half of the songs (“Fell In Love With a Girl,” “Hotel Yorba,” i.e. the singles) are fast, jangly, skittery, written for two minutes of breathless hyperactivity. The others rise and fall, with multiple bridges, vamps and breaks. In my head, “The Union Forever“, a brilliant song built entirely of Citizen Kane quotes, is seven minutes long. It must be, be cause there are three distinct movements. In reality, it’s three minutes long. That is baffling. And brilliant!

The Used, Lies for the Liars: I don’t like “dirty” rock. I don’t like any music where it looks like the participants are in need of a bath. And I certainly don’t want to see any of that live. But then, after a probably random turn of events, Lies for the Liars ended up on my desk. There aren’t words to adequately describe the controlled, intense power of this album. It feels like the band is just barely able to control the power in their instruments, but under all that screaming and snarling, there’s brutal, heartfelt lyrics, and some of the catchiest tunes of the decade. You have to give The Used a shot just because they’re fearless. They’ll throw a trumpet break into a song, they’ll randomly bust out a dance track, because what harm is there in trying?

Empires, Howl: I was going to prevaricate and spin some bull about how the changing tide of the music industry demands that I include a self-published album, but we’re friends here. Howl just fucking rules. And it rules double because the band made it themselves and distributed it for free online. In a decade where most new bands are either fifteen years old or have never held a real job, Empires are extremely talented boys who are wage slaves like the rest of us. And because of that, they appreciate the effort that fans go to to support them. But it’s easy to support them because they’re actually good. Howl is loud and fierce, sometimes punishing, sometimes uplifting. It doesn’t take the weird chances that we expect self-published music to take (He’s a crazy outlaw who doesn’t want a record deal? He probably plays the euphonium and sings about Merriwether Lewis!), but it proves definitively that MOR doesn’t have to be bad. Half of this album could be used in car commercials and the uplifting endings of teen movies, and I would love every minute of that. They’re like OneRepublic, only they don’t suck! And it’s free, so you have no excuse for not trying it.

Interpol, Antics: Interpol is an extremely refined band. Their first major release, the excellent Turn On the Bright Lights, sounds rough, but artfully so. It was crafted to sound like it wasn’t crafted at all. It was the Rolling Stones of 2009 posing as the Rolling Stones of 1969. It still sounds phenomenal, their ability with hooks and lyrics and patterns already apparent. But when you saw them live in their sharp suits, you had to know that the grittiness just wasn’t them. And then they put out Antics. Antics is all of that musical silver highly polished. This album gleams. It’s major label music, tight, well-constructed. That makes the craftsmanship stand out. The album has an arc, building and receding, and with lyrics so indelible you could tattoo them on your arm. This was the sound of the moment with the kids of the Lower East Side got 9-5 jobs, bought apartments and switched from cheap Pabst to$10 cocktails. This was the moment when Interpol taught us that you could be classy and still be cool.

We Are Scientists, With Love and Squalor: The 00s were largely about concept albums, genre- and band-defining works that lived or died on the merit of their vision. With Love is the opposite. It’s an album of singles, without a skipper in the bunch.

Jimmy Eat World, Bleed American: Back when I was 20 and unexpectedly back in San Francisco for 8 months, I discovered both indie music and indie rock club Popscene. It was named for a Blur song. I thought that was fantastically clever. I raved about The White Stripes. But I drove to school every day listening to Bleed American. It wasn’t hipster cool like everything else I loved. It was mainstream alt-rock, the stuff that was playing on the radio back in the dull midwestern towns I’d escaped, but it was so good. I felt on the edge of tears every time I heard “Hear You Me”, and one night at Popscene, when I heard the opening of “A Praise Chorus“, a music lover’s anthem to music, I yelled “This is my song!” and danced my heart out. This album hits every emotion the way that American rock sometimes can. There’s a song on there for every mood, and they’re all excellent.