Vampire Weekend

Lollapalooza Day 3 Review: Mowgli’s, Two Door Cinema Club, Vampire Weekend

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Ricky in Concerts | Leave a comment

Vampire Weekend

Editor’s note: This is day 3 of Celeste’s coverage of Lollapalooza

Winner of “everyone obviously only knew one song and was waiting for that one song to be played” for Lolla Sunday: Mowgli’s. These guys played the BMI stage and it was packed (I headed there when I got bored of Lianne La Havas – I’m sure she’s great but she’s not fantastic as festival fare) and everyone just chatted throughout the entire set until they got to “San Francisco” and then it was just one big sing-a-long.

Best timing of Lollapalooza Sunday: Alt-J. Ran from Two Door Cinema Club to Alt-J just in time to catch dissolve me. Perfect. I’ve heard great things about this band but as was the theme of Lolla Sunday they weren’t great festival fare.

Lolla Sunday band that sounded the best as I breezed by on my way to another stage: Waaves.

Most impressively packed crowd of Lolla Sunday: Two Door Cinema Club. It’s hard to gauge at festivals how popular an act is going to be, but I did not expect Two Door Cinema Club to pack the huge Bud Light stage. They weren’t quite as fun as I thought they were going to be (as in, I thought they were going to be wearing outrageous outfits and rocking out, but in fact they were wearing suits and they were rather staid) but they were spot on music-wise.

Best food of Lollapalooza: River Valley Kitchen portabello mushroom tamales. Jum.

Overall Winner of Lollapalooza: Vampire Weekend. Halley once saw a band try to cover a Vampire Weekend song – they apparently couldn’t keep up with the fast paced beat of the song and fell flat on their face. Halley then gained major respect for Vampire Weekend, because she figured if it was that hard to cover their stuff they must be pretty talented to play it in the first place. Being her little sister I of course follow blindly behind and believe everything she believes, so I was pretty damn excited when I found out they were playing Lolla. They did not disappoint. Starting with Cousins – one of my favorites, and ending with Walcott – another one of my favorites – and hitting every amazing, bubbly, fast paced chord perfectly on pitch, Vampire Weekend had every man woman and child busting out their finest dance moves from the front row to the last. Normally I’m all about hitting the small stages and getting up close and personal with the band, but it did not make the slightest difference how far away from Vampire Weekend you were. Their energy radiated out to the farthest reaches.

SXSW Preview: Third Round Of Bands Analyzed

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Paul in South By Southwest | Leave a comment

Another day, another round of bands announced for this year’s edition of SXSW and your friendly neighbourhood Panic Manual is here to tell you who we think is of interest.  This is who we are.  This is what we do.  On to the bands:

Ash – A Panic Manual favourite.  They will rock out.  They will be a lot of fun.  That is all.

Camera Obscura – Glasgow’s finest.  Tracyanne Campbell and co. are ready to charm us all with their lovely indie pop.

Prince Paul – Occasionally also known as Chest Rockwell, this is the man behind such gems as Gravediggaz, Handsome Boy Modelling School, and the first few De La Soul albums.  Why would you not want to go see him?

Skid Row – Yes, you heard right.  Skid. Freakin’. Row.  Sure, Sebastian Bach may be conspicuously absent, but still … 18 and Life?  Youth Gone Wild?  I Remember You?  Yes, please.

TOY – Psych-heavy, shoegazey indie rock from London.

Chad Valley – Another Panic Manual fave, Hugo Manual’s one man electronic solo project looks like it may even eclipse his other gig fronting Jonquil.  Catchy and trippy. 

Vampire Weekend – Hey look!  They’re back.  It seems like a long time since the band unleashed their sophomore effort Contra on the public, but I guess they did have to deal with that cover art lawsuit thing.  So yeah, they’re back.  Rejoice.  Or don’t.  It’s really up to you I suppose.  

 

Review: Coachella 2010, Part 2: Surprising Sub-Par Acts

Posted on April 30, 2010 by sarahw in Concerts | 3 Comments

Palm Springs – Continued from part 1

Surprisingly Sub Par Acts

One: MGMT

After that love-fest, let’s move onto the bands that left a bad taste in my mouth. First up is MGMT, their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, was repeated on my iPod for ages when it first came out. Amazing from start to finish. Their second album, Congratulations was a departure from their indie rock smash hit, a little more disjointed and psychedelic and took a lot of listens to begin to grow on me. Regardless I was pretty psyched to see them live, they arrived on stage and announced that they would play all the songs from their new album, okay fine, it just came out. They played about 3 or 4 songs from their new album which no one really knew and were underwhelming live to say the least. These guys just have no stage presence, their vocals are weak and they make no effort to involve the audience. They finally got to songs like Kids and Time to Pretend, however, still with no audience interaction, fine, you’re still pretty inexperienced. The kicker for me is at one point between songs, they actually had the audacity to ask the audience to buy their new album. Come on guys, many bands at Coachella just dropped new albums and not one of them shamelessly promoted themselves. Live tours are how you promote an album and it helps when you show audience appreciation and actually have some presence on stage. I may buy their future albums, yes, but will I ever attend another MGMT show? Definitely not.

Two: Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend tunes are always a regular in the summer, an indie band made up of rich white dudes playing catchy Californian pop songs that have a somewhat African edge. Both Vampire Weekend albums are great, start to finish. As you can probably tell I’m big on the stage presence and these guys just don’t have it. They played all their hits, but the crowd and myself were not moving, at all. I saw some head bops but they didn’t really get things going, their performance was basically boring.

Three: Pavement

Pavement, what can I say, didn’t like them before Coachella, tried to open my mind and see what all the reunion buzz was about so I caught some of their set. Still don’t get it. Not a fan.

Concert Review: Rogers Picnic, July 20 2008, Fort York, Part 2

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Mark in Concerts | 2 Comments

So as Ricky was saying, Animal Collective didn’t really connect with the Rogers Picnic crowd. Fortunately their set was followed up by Montreal-based Chromeo. This band’s dance friendly brand of electronic & guitar sounds was an immediate crowd pleaser. Even though it was raining pretty hard at this point, it was the first time that I felt that people were acting, well, festive, at this day-long festival. Big ups to the fans that wore rubber boots and embraced the mud and rain.

Tokyo Police Club was up next. I really like a few songs from Tokyo Police Club, like “Your English is Good”, and I was glad to hear it live. I’d say this band put on a pretty good show, and got pretty into it. I was very impressed with the sheer energy coming out of keyboardist Graham Wright. I love it when musicians lose themselves in their music.

But the big highlight for most of the crowd was Cat Power. This woman owns herself in way that is both rare and beautiful. Seeing her sing up close was pretty amazing. She puts so much of herself into her music, she seems so vulnerable, yet at the same time, exudes a “this me, this is who I am, deal with it” aura about her stage presence that was fascinating to see.

So, now let me get to my rant about big-screen TV’s and text-messaging. There were two large TV screens on both sides of the stage showing a live-feed of the performers. I suppose this is a pretty standard feature of rock shows nowadays. What was new to me was that the bottom of the TV was reserved for a stock-ticker type deal where people could send text messages and get them displayed in more or less real time. This made for a weird concert experience. Now I admit that sometimes people had really funny things to say, like “no one is safe until nerd prosecution is over”. But by and large, the screens were cluttered with inane texts from hapless youth.

Unfortunately for me, I am eternally enchanted and absorbed with shiny or moving objects. I was transfixed throughout. I just couldn’t help but be engrossed. This, with the addition of my complete inability to multi-task, meant that I spent more time reading the damn stock ticker than listening to the music. So I would say thumbs down on the ticker, but I would say thumbs up that Rogers Picnic seemed to make efforts to make this a green event.

The last show was City and Colour. Unfortunately, perhaps because it was Sunday night, there was a mass exodus after Cat Power. We joined suit, but I left pretty happy with the live music I had absorbed throughout the day.

Vampire Weekend: 4/5
Chromeo: 4.2/5
Tokyo Police Club: 3.8/5
Cat Power: 4.5/5
Stock Ticker: 1/5
Green Policy: 5/5
Rogers Picnic: 3.7/5