But But I I Was Was There There: Vampire Weekend @ the Troubadour, 7/16/07; The Field @ the MOR Bar, 7/19/07

Ohmigod, shoes

Vampire Weekend, "Walcott" - I'd long since come to terms with the fact that Vampire Weekend were a pretty safe pick for the role of Indie-Rock Kids Who Come Clear Out Of Nowhere To Get Featured On Like Episodes Of The Office And Stuff for 2006, but until I made my way up to the Troubadour on Monday and saw a line nearly stretching from the ticket window to the (terrible and overpriced) Indian restaurant on the corner, I had no idea just how safe a bet it was. Unfortunately, as with any shit-hot indie band on the rise, the overwhelming preponderence of their fanbase at the moment consists of douchebags of the highest order, the kind of people who only take the shrinkwrapping off the box sets they buy to get their friends to stop pointing and laughing at them; I can safely guarantee you that if St. Kelefa hadn't written Vampire Weekend up, half the audience would have been disrupting their roommates' living-room conversations by plopping themselves down in the corner and breaking out the old guitar. And really, someone's gotta point it out: Vampire Weekend really couldn't be a more ideally-suited band for this particular breed of 'bag, not only musically (in a very real way, their sound might as well be lab-grown to appeal to everyone who grew up listening to Graceland but still wants to wave their indie-rock dick around), but sartorially; Jen spent the entire night flipping out over the entire non-rhythm section's decision to wear overpoweringly preppy uniforms right down to the matching topsiders (apparently a VERY SERIOUS OFFENSE or something), while I couldn't help but notice that I'd managed to get excited about a band whose drummer wears Phish t-shirts in public seemingly without even the most cursory trace of irony.

Luckily, none of this discounts them from being really, really good. When D. Wreck passed along a copy of their LP a few months ago, I will freely admit to being less-than-overwhelmed (or, at most, "whelmed"); what I heard was a bunch of songs which sounded like they needed about a quarter of their running time excised and a substantial amount of work put into tightening up their sound, and I just didn't see the point in anointing them Kings of NY Indie Up'N'Comers while the Harlem Shakes are still stomping around. Well, Monday night did a damn good job not just of illuminating just how much tighter their sound's gotten even over the last few months, but of how exceptional a gift these kids have when it comes to actually playing their songs, a rarer gift than you might think these days. I mean, at least in a live context they're so good at turning their songs into discrete total packages that their attempts at hooks almost grate, and as someone who lurves a good hook that's not something I say very often. And it's hardly a matter of being impressed by the technique at the heart of their deceptively convoluted song structures; "Walcott" is almost free from the polyrhythms and World Musicisms that go so far to define their sound, but oh my god did they ever pull it off live; this demo version really doesn't do justice to the sound those keys make when they're crashing so insistently right in front of you. I strongly suggest that you check out their show live if you get a chance - and make sure to get there early, too. (Click here to visit the band's homepage and buy the "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" single directly from them)

Annie, "Heartbeat" (The Field remix) - I have to admit to being more than a little disappointed by the Field's set at the MOR Bar in Santa Monica last night; I don't exactly know what I might have been expecting from a set of his, but "forty five minutes of nothing but his music" was pretty much the furthest thing from it. That's not to say that I had a bad time, of course - I defy the techno-loving World of Sense to have a bad time in any environment where "Sun & Ice" is playing, especially when the entire audience totally falls for the "record skip" towards the middle - but I tend to think of DJ sets as a chance for me to get some forced exposure to stuff I wouldn't have listened to otherwise, not recaps of stuff on which I've already come to a conclusion. Still, if nothing else last night ably demonstrated that the Field's aesthetic technique of suddenly yanking his songs out of abstraction has some serious dancefloor legs; whenever he'd introduce elements of concrete familiarity - the infamous Kate Bush sample, that cheesy guitar at the end of "A Paw In My Face", and most of all Annie's chorus as heard in the song accompanying this post - the crowd came alive, or at least as alive as a crowd of Westside Beautiful People can feasibly get. (Click here to buy From Here We Go Sublime from Insound)

Pete & the Pirates, "Come On Feet" - I have to admit that the most lasting impression surrounding Pete & the Pirates' Wait Stop Begin EP is probably going to end up being the note reading "AWESOME!!!!" which the mailing clerk at Insound decided to scribble onto the margin of my order slip; there are few dragons I chase with more determination than experiences with record-store customer service which actually manage to ratify my taste, and it's enormously reassuring to see that it won't necessarily be going the way of the dinosaur as the music-selling business moves out of the brick-and-mortars and into cyberspace (helloooooooo 2000!). Fortunately, whoever the mysterious "JW" might have been, he/she was devastatingly right, since if Pete & the Pirates are to be summed up in a word, "Awesome" suits just about as well as any; their EP isn't wholly consistent since they're such a young band, but their peak moments - the most immediately accessible of which is easily "Come On Feet" - are so flat-out invigorating that it's easy to forgive. I mean, we could sit here all day throwing out comparisons - Maximo Park, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Wombats, etc etc etc - but any comparison would really just pale in comparison to these guys' readily-available gifts for pacing and inflection; just because they bump sonic elbows with a bunch of bands, after all, doesn't mean that they can't be awesome. Or, as the case may be, AWESOME!!!! (Click here to buy the Wait Stop Begin EP from Insound)

The Paper Cranes, "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" - Realize, gentle reader, that by describing the Paper Cranes as a hybrid of the Arcade Fire and the Cure, I'm characterizing them as a cross between my favorite band to make fun of and quite possibly my least favorite band in history (respectively). Of course, those descriptors flower into obviousness elsewhere on their debut EP Veins; lead single "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" seems almost completely free of both the vocal histrionics and the meticulous time signatures in comparison to the rest of the songs, instead choosing to ride a piano refrain which takes it dangerously, deliciously close to Dexy's Midnight Runners or even kinda Spoon-ish territory. Luckily for the band, one trait "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" does share with the rest of their output is an almost psychotic gift for getting stuck in one's head; they really could stand to tighten their rhythm section up (wow, twice in one blog entry! do I get a prize?) if only because the idioms in which they tend to operate increase in effectiveness in direct proportion to their rhythmic single-mindedness, but seriously, "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" is the standout track due to its structuring - in terms of songwriting, other songs on the Veins EP (particularly "Milkrun" and "Out On The Horse Tracks") match it, assuming they don't surpass it outright. You'd be smart to check it out before their album drops next month and people find themselves incapable of shutting up about them. (Click here to buy the Veins EP from Insound)