Shortly after 8 o’clock last night Sharon Van Etten took the stage accompanied by Heather Woods Broderick in the Swyer Theatre at The Egg. She wore a simple but very flattering black dress and shyly said “Um, hello” into the microphone before slinging her bright red electric (yes, electric) guitar over her shoulder. Continue reading
At 7:41AM on Thursday May 31st I received a text message from my father:
“I’m sure you read that the Psychedelic Furs are at The Egg Saturday at 8PM?”
I hadn’t heard. And so, this article is going to prove two things:
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When I heard that there was going to be a Trailer Park Boys live show locally at The Egg in Albany, I immediately bought a ticket. Trailer Park Boys is a show that I have been drunkenly plowing through for the past three months. I was unsure as to how Ricky, Julian and Bubbles would pull off a live performance, but I figured that they had a better shot than most television comedians because some of the funniest moments in the show are seemingly off-the-cuff exchanges between characters. I could not have anticipated Continue reading
I was rather looking forward to seeing Passion Pit regardless of the fact that they were playing at Northern Lights on a Monday night. It’s usually okay to show up fashionably late, or just plain late, and not miss much at a Northern Lights show. The doors for this particular event opened at 6:30 Continue reading
Let me preface this by saying that I did not go to this show in the best of spirits. I woke up at 7:30 on Tuesday morning with a “muscular” headache to a throttling jackhammer dismantling my sidewalk outside. Apparently the Albany OGS felt the bricks were getting a bit too uneven on the sidewalk. I’ll trip on them just the same. Tax dollars at work waking my ass up.
I committed the cardinal concert sin on the way to work and listened to the artist on the day of a live show: a bit of Easy Beat and Shame, Shame in the car. Work was busy as [fill in expletive] and I was forced to work through lunch in order to get out of there anytime close to 5 o’clock. Continue reading
First off, let me say that Northern Lights is and has always been a lackluster venue. When I was first seeing concerts there almost ten years ago, it was claustrophobic and the acoustics were shitty. Years later, the venue bought out the neighboring property, broke down a wall and now has twice the original square footage if not more. The acoustics are still usually shitty.
Secondly, midweek concerts drive me absolutely insane. It would be one thing if I lived in an actual metropolis, like say, New York City. Doors open at 9 on a Wednesday night in a satellite suburb of the God-knows-why capital of New York with three acts scheduled? I’m not happy that I’m a nine-to-fiver already; late, mid-week concerts are like a sack-tap from a chain mail glove.
Finally…February 29th. That wonderful day afforded to us only once every four years brought garbage weather. When I was leaving Albany Continue reading
I discovered The Feelies in the summer after high school. I was screwing around on allmusic.com looking at Pavement’s page when I noticed the “Influenced By” section. At the time (and not much has changed) I was totally obsessed with Pavement. I figured, why not give some of these bands a shot that supposedly influenced them? As it turns out, the list was a gold mine. I recognized some bands, but that list introduced me to Wire, Can, Swell Maps, Half Japanese, Pere Ubu, oh, and The Feelies. I downloaded their 1980 debut (I was a poor-ass college kid…I’ll make up for it later). “Crazy Rhythms” became one of my most listened to albums of that year. Continue reading
I never thought that I would get to see the Human League and so this past Friday was a total treat. That being said, the concert followed a disastrous 6 1/2 hour car-ride from Albany to NYC thanks to being gridlocked in New Jersey traffic. I missed the opener, Men Without Hats. I can’t say that I care. There was a major novelty factor there, but I’m not sure that I could have stomached a 40-minute set by a legitimate one-hit wonder. For all I know they played a 40 minute “Safety Dance.”
I arrived at the Best Buy Theater at 8:55 drenched (from rain in case there was any question), which gave me just enough time to order three tall-boys at the bar and catch the second half of “Never Let Me Go.” I have to admit…they sounded phenomenal. I was also pleased that a band that was touring to promote a new album wasn’t afraid to have their set span their catalog. Despite their popularity reaching the US in singles like “Don’t You Want Me” and “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” the Human League had much greater success across the Atlantic. And honestly, what I’ve heard off of their new album is not bad at all.
Phil Oakey was a little less androgynous than usual. He, now bald, began with an occupied Europe-esque pleather frock and then changed into a white frill-less tunic. I have to admit, Susanne Sulley looked pretty GILFy in her white applique dress. The background visuals were great. Most memorably: sheep tourists visited international monuments during “Sound of the Crowd,” clips of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” looped during “Heart Like A Wheel,” and a warp scene from Super Mario 3 was spliced into a black and white romance flick for “Together in Electric Dreams.” There was definitely some Tron in there too…
I, like everybody else, raged when they sang “Don’t You Want Me” (I apologize for my drunken, tone-deaf singing on the video…I had a few more tall-boys under my belt at that point), but I have to admit that that song is still one of my favorite pop songs of all time regardless of its relegation to the realm of one-hit wonderdom in the US.
Overall, the concert was very entertaining despite the car ride down and the hot mess behind me who dumped her whiskey and soda all over my back before nose-diving in a puddle. I did try to help her up until she got combative. “Leave me alone I’m fine!” Ok, bitch, sit in a puddle.
Early on in the concert, Oakey humbly remarked that the band members were all fans of their rock contemporaries like Television and T. Rex, but they were looking for something that people would not only enjoy, but could dance to. It was synth-pop, and they spearheaded the movement.
the self-hating hipster 