Results tagged “vampireweekend”

Volume One was pretty cool. Two was better. Three was great. Volume Four is hands down the best. Is it simply because it's new? Because the songs are still fresh? We don't think so. There's more more to it than that.

It'd be easy to bitch and complain about certain aspects of the Capitol Hill Block Party. Sure, it attracts a bevy of tools who by the end of the night are barely-standing drunken douchebags. And yes, you have to put up with the poorly-scripted political pablum in between acts. Plus, in the aftermath, there's all that garbage. But in the midst of the typical festival chaos, there are plenty of things to praise about this year's block party. Here's our list:

Friday: Catch Common Market (4:30) and U.S.E. (5:30) at the main stage, then skip over to King Cobra for the second half of Truckasaurus (6:00). Take a dinner break (may we suggest eating something protein-heavy?), then get yerself to Neumo's for Thee Emergency at 7:45. After that, we suggest Das Llamas (it's their last set...THEIR LAST ONE!) at 9:45 at the Cha Cha. To round out the night, buy yourself a fancy rum drink at Havana and party until the wee hours with DJ Curtis.

Hooray! The first batch of the Capitol Hill Block Party line-up for this summer has been announced, and we're thrilled to see what a truly fine list it is. Hot groups such as Vampire Weekend, Les Savy Fav, Kimya Dawson, and The Physics are already confirmed, with nary a six-hour-long Spoon set to be found. (Okay, so maybe last year's Spoon performance wasn't exactly six hours long, but it kinda felt like it.)

Standing outside Neumo's Wednesday night, a friend of ours started ruminating on his recent house-hunting experience in the Central District: All the new places being advertised, he said, were townhouse style units with garages below them. The effect reminded him of frontier forts, with their wooden walls separating them from the wilderness. How exactly our conversation led from Vampire Weekend's concert inside to this is a little hazy, but it nevertheless summarizes the band pretty well: Much like those urban fortresses in the CD that keep their residents safely above street level, Vampire Weekend, notwithstanding their tightness and pop transcultural experimentation, is also about making black people's stuff safe for white people.

Saturday at the Croc, we hated most of the crowd at first sight. Who invited the tools to John in the Morning at Night? Jager shots were being consumed, and there were way too many dudes in backwards white baseball caps, just chillaxing with their brahs. For this, we can only blame Vampire Weekend.

Twenty-one year-old Mercury Prize nominee Jamie T has his first show in Seattle at the Croc Saturday, and it's a big 'un: John in the Morning at Night. He'll be primarily playing from his debut full-length, but we're sure he'll throw in a few songs not found on Panic Prevention. After all, as Jamie himself said, "There's, what, sixteen songs on the album? I had about forty-five songs for that record, just because I'd been writing and recording loads of shit all the time, and everything on the next one is going to be brand new."

British boy wonder/musical polyglot Jamie T makes his first trip to Seattle to play the latest incarnation of John in the Morning at Night, coming up this Saturday at the Croc. On his debut full-length Panic Prevention, the young Mr. T. makes veritable sound collages, amalgams of rock, reggae, punk, soul, rap, heavy cockney accents, and assorted audio clips. That's exactly why he gets comparisons that run the gamut from a baby Bob Dylan to a "one-man Arctic Monkey" to "the bastard lovechild of Billy Bragg and Mike Skinner doing his best Joe Strummer impression" (eminently choice quotes care of Wikipedia). When we asked Jamie how he would characterize his sound, he cheekily referred to a bandmate's description: "My friend Ben who plays drums in the Pacemakers [his backing band] describes it best--well, it's the only way I like to describe it--like liquid shit being poured into your ear." Delightful.

Early during Sunday's Vampire Weekend set we sent a note to a friend asking, "Has KEXP frat-rock been coined a genre yet?" It was a half-flippant statement, based on the overly-enthusiastic fratty dudes standing to our left and the band's J. Crew ad appearance. In our more bitter days, we would have allowed those two factors to color our impression of the band and their output, but we'd already enjoyed Vampire Weekend's eponymous EP, so we quieted our inner hater (frat guys are people too) and judged the band on their own merits, not the hype, their appearance, or their audience. Sure, being impartial should go without saying, but if you're a long-time reader you know us bloggers are a fickle sort.

Yes, the line-up for Bumbershoot is more than underwhelming, but check this shit out: