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Live Review: Wavves, These Are Powers, Vampire Hands @ The Market Hotel (2009.03.28)

wavves-2Photo credit: Tom Pavlich

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MP3: Vampire Hands – Opium Typhoon

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MP3: So Wavves – Bored (Anamanaguchi cover)

Being a Baltimore-based college student living in New York, I’d like to take some time to walk through a few of the differences I’ve noticed between shows in New York and Baltimore. In my relatively meager experience with the two, I’ve noticed that Baltimore’s dancing tends to be more self-satisfying. The wild jittering and jumping involved at concerts in our fair city serves a whole different purpose than in New York or Brooklyn. Baltimore’s dancing is more inward-based. You’re bouncing ecstatically, shaking your head from side to side pretending you’re insane…it’s all for you. Every single person in front of the stage looks stupid, and nobody cares even a little bit.

Brooklyn shows, however, utilize dancing in a whole different way. I arrived at the so-DIY-you-can’t-find-it Market Hotel last Saturday night to a packed room of youngin’s collaborating in clusters of 2-5. While they existed in groups, it was easy to see that the hipsters were (comically) more self-attentive than they were involved in their respective circles. This apparent self-obsession was the first negative foreshadowing of how these New Yorkers work at indie concerts.

Vampire Hands’ unfamiliar presence took the stage at the crack of 9:30. They consisted of a drummer, a guitarist, a bassist, and a dude who sang while he messed with some looping tools and circuit-bent electronics. Aside from reminding me that standar guitar/bass/keyboard/drums bands still exist in this ever nonconforming world, they also brought a couple of really great tunes. Read the rest…

Album Review: These Are Powers – All Aboard Future (Dead Oceans)

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MP3: These Are Powers – Adam’s Turtle

A trip to These Are Powers’ Last.fm page will tell you that they’re commonly referred to as noise rock, experimental, art rock, and their own made up genre, ghost punk (among other already poorly-defined terms). I’m not sure about you, but a couple of those don’t exactly measure up to the uncomfortable force these three Brooklyn-Chicago interminglers gravitate around. In reading some of the other press about this alienated trio, I have yet to find anything that accurately describes precisely what they do.

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