I didn’t mention it then, but during my last venture into the blogger cage my cerebral cortex was being melted by Fuck Buttons (or “F**k Buttons,” if you believe all our signage). In MySpace parlance, they’re “experimental / progressive / other.” That “other” could be all sorts of things. I’d say “migraine” works but maybe that’s unfair, because I’ve never actually had a migraine-- so let’s say, um, they sounded like “how I felt on my fifth day in Texas.” Their droning buzz was my lack of sleep. And food. Their frenetic yelps channeled through a Fischer-Price tape recorder were my still-blistered feet crying out for mercy. Their distorted Game Boy bleeps and bloops were my overambitious showcase-attendance schedule, adherence to which soon proved as futile and overwhelming as anything beyond the second level of Tetris. I’m not saying it was bad. It just made me feel like goo.
The night before, after my second meal of the week at Stubb’s, I dragged Caren and Nate over to Antone’s to see Basia Bulat. She’s one of our Emergent (née Four to Watch) artists in the newly re-designed April issue, and her debut album Oh, My Darling is quickly becoming one of my favorites of the year so far. It’s by no means a perfect album, but her voice is beautiful, her lyrics clever and twisting and thoughtful-- she’s definitely worth keeping tabs on. Antone’s was packed and she’d already played a few songs by the time we arrived (in one of the most frustrating moments of the week, a bunch of non-badgeholders were let inside the venue before us and we were left to wait outside as she and her band bounced through “In the Night,” my favorite from her album and the catchiest auto-harp driven anthemic pop song you’ll hear in a while) but we squirmed our way inside and caught the last half of her set, which included my second ("Pilgriming Vine") and third ("I Was A Daughter") favorite songs from Darling.
Foreign Born came on next, and I swear that until the minute they took the stage in their worn-out corduroys and plaid cowboy shirts, I thought they were a hip-hop group. What? ‘Scuse my ignorance, it’s not like a work for a music magazine or anything. Jeez. By the time I’d fully wrapped my head around this, the set was mostly over, but I remember it being pretty fun, full of twangy, bright guitars and a closer that found the lead singer tossing down his acoustic, grabbing the mic off the stand, and sauntering around the stage, making me wish he’d broken loose a little earlier.
After that, this other band played… I think they’re called Vampire Weekend? You’ve probably never heard of them. They’re these four kids from some fancy school in New York, they just put out a new album, they’re kind of catchy and… okay, this is getting weird. It’s hard to be sarcastic about Vampire Weekend, to make understatements about their popularity, to kid about their youth. For all intents and purposes, you shouldn’t have heard of them. They are practically kids. (And I say that as a kid myself.) Their first album was just released in January and before that they’d just recorded songs during stolen moments between classes at Columbia. When we picked them as one of our Four to Watch in February, we felt like we were letting our readers in on a secret treasure-- except all you NYC people, who were totally over them back in, like, October. And I guess at the time they were a secret. You know, two months ago. But now they’re on the cover of Spin. What? Yeah.
This explains why, once we found a place to stand at Antone’s on Friday, we soon could not move from that spot. By the end of Foreign Born’s set, we were blocked in from all sides. The bartending staff kept sending their tiniest hipster envoy into the crowd with drink tray after drink tray, delivering Bud Lights and returning minutes later to collect the empties, her painfully ironic 80s mom glasses knocked askew by stray elbows more than once. If there had been a fire, we’d have been fully toasted. I kept getting poked in the butt crack by what I can only hope was the overloaded tote bag of the person standing behind me; once Vampire Weekend took the stage, the woman standing in front of Caren began dancing so violently and in such a strange manner (extremely erratic hip/butt thrusting) that the woman standing on the other side of her actually expressed concern for Caren’s safety and offered to “keep an eye on her” in case a stray thrust her flying.
Fortunately, there was no fire and Caren stood steadfast against all the booty bumping. In fact, you can read her comparative analysis of Vampire Weekend’s SXSW show with their performance at the EARL in Atlanta just days before, right here. As for me, the show was pretty much what I expected-- really fun, great energy, suitably bouncy musicianship and smiley delivery of most of the songs from their self-titled XL debut. But the crowd of flailing arms and shouted-along lyrics-- while certainly preferable to the detached, stoic crowd Caren described at the EARL-- only added to my anxious suspicion that maybe too much is happening too soon for this still really young band. Or maybe that’s the tote bag up my butt talking.
We snuck out before the last few songs-- didn’t even get to see “Oxford Comma,” the full-on geekiness of which endearded me to them in the first place. Caren and I ditched Nate (sleep, I can has it?) and tromped back down to 6th street to the Parish for She & Him. Nothing could keep us from M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel’s swirly, ukelele-y, girl group-y, nostalgia-overload… except a line so huge that it required stanchions like the ones we used to control the lines when I worked at the ticketing counter at the Tennessee Aquarium. Later we heard that Britt Daniel did some time in that very same line-- good thing we left, then, because if Spoon’s lead singer has to stand in line for his own label’s showcase, we certainly didn’t stand a chance.
Though discouraged, Caren and I weren’t fully exhausted, so we decided to read through every other act playing at 12 AM. Then we were exhausted. And about a dozen blocks from our hotel. And exhausted. Did I mention we were exhausted? We were. And we saw this as the perfect opportunity to hop on a pedicab. Best $20 we spent all week.
Email
Leave a comment