It looks like once again, we’ll have to wait until the spring for GPB to scrape together an on-campus concert.
While WGTB has already put on their fall show, hosting Titus Andronicus and Free Energy this Friday, GPB seems to be sticking to the recent trend of reserving concerts for the end of the year.
According to GPB Concert Chair Danny Fortin, with only two months left in the semester, GPB has not yet begun the concert planning process. For comparison, GPB started planning in January for T-Pain’s late April concert last spring.
Luckily not all D.C. area colleges’ programming boards are so blasé about concert planning.
George Washington University’s programing board is hosting Maroon 5 on Friday, November 13—and they’ve kindly opened the ticket sales up to students at other local universities. Tickets are on sale now and cost $30 (what can you do, everything’s more expensive at GW).
The Walkmen, a popular mainstay among the indie rock set who played at the 9:30 Club this Tuesday, is no stranger to D.C.—four of the five band members were classmates at the St. Albans School. Their latest release, 2008’s You & Me, was a stylistic departure from the group’s previous work. With more brass parts that incite visions of a far away mariachi band, the group embraced a more reflective sound. On Tuesday the band solidified this direction with a deluge of new songs featuring a more acoustic sound and horns-a-plenty.
Almost half of the set consisted of new songs, not unlike their new iTunes EP. Before the show we were able to meet with Kevin Moehringer, a member of the group’s brass section, to talk about the band’s recording process. The band’s brass section debuted on You & Me, and has played an increasingly larger role in the group’s music. This summer the Walkmen went to Gigantic Studios in Manhattan to record new material for an upcoming album.
How do you win one? By filling out our Date Lab Georgetown survey! Date Lab Georgetown is a new feature we’re starting where we’ll be setting up Georgetown students on blind dates (which will include free tea, coffee and bagels, courtesy of the Corp).
All you have to do is fill out the survey by 10 a.m. tomorrow, and on the first question be sure to include the phrase “Enter me in the She Wants Revenge ticket giveaway.” We’ll randomly select two winners and let them know by noon on Tuesday.
If you’ve already filled out the Date Lab Georgetown survey and want to be entered in the raffle, just shoot an email to blog@georgetownvoice.com with your name and with the subject line “She Wants Revenge ticket giveaway.”
Want to show more support for Date Lab Georgetown? Join our Facebook Group and invite your friends!
Starting Thursday night and rolling on through Sunday, Washington D.C. will be treated to a series of free (FREE!) concerts, courtesy of the Kia Soul Collective Tour. Yes, that KIA, better known for mediocre motorcars than music, mirth, and mayhem.
No comment on the cars, but as for the music, they brought the goods: five of the rockinest, the groovinest, and the dancinest acts in the world, including MGMT, Wale, and Dan Deacon. Just check the lineup, pick your night(s) and show up!
Tickets are free (FREE!) but, fair warning, the MGMT show may cost you your dignity: to get tix, you’ll have to test drive a KIA car. And for the Thursday show, you’ll need to RSVP and have an ID that says you’re 21. But for all the rest, just show up to 3330 New York Ave NE and get on with it!
DC Councilmembers have a long, amusing history of criminal hijinx, from Marion “Bitch Set Me Up” Barry to former At-large representative Harold Brazil’s recent dust-up at Jinxproof tattoo parlor. Not to be outdone, Jersey City, New Jersey Councilmember Steven Lipski came to DC this weekend and managed to set the bar for embarrassing criminal activity a rung lower when he peed on fellow concert-goers from the balcony of the 9:30 Club Friday night.
What bands was Lipski there to see? According to Last.fm, Friday’s main act was Dark Star Orchestra, which, according to its website: “recreates Grateful Dead shows, song for song, live on stage.” That’d be enough to get anyone rowdy, but Lipski was fairly inebriated already:
“He was very drunk,” the source [from the 9:30 club] said, noting that it wasn’t the first time Lipski had caused a ruckus at the popular concert venue.
“We’ve dealt with this man before,” the source added. “He’s never peed on anybody, but he gets really belligerent and drunk.”
If the crap bands won’t come to Georgetown, Georgetown must go to the crap bands. So thinks the Georgetown Program Board, anyway. Not content to simply waste money bringing sub-standard music to Georgetown (Coolio), GPB is branching out. According to the Weekly Events email, GPB is subsidizing tickets to a Halloween show at George Mason’s Patriot Center featuring Panic! at the Disco, Dashboard Confessional, Plain White T’s, and the Cab. “Tickets are retailing for over $50, but you can go with GPB for only $10 for GU students, $5 GPB Members and $15 off-campus students,” the email reads.
So GPB is spending around $40 per student to go see four (terrible) bands 20 miles away from campus? Ridiculous. Why does GPB subsidize Top 40 concerts out in NoVa while ignoring the countless shows here in D.C. that are twice as good and one third as cheap? I can understand that not everyone dislikes bands like Panic! at the Disco, but GPB should at least provide alternatives for people who do.
Photo from Flickr userNRK P3 used under a Creative Commons license.
Kurt Cobain used to wear a T-shirt that said “Grunge is dead.” But if you saw Mudhoney—who ushered in grunge rock in the late 1980s with their EP “Superfuzz Bigmuff”—at the Rock and Roll Hotel last Monday night, you’d have to agree that it’s still alive and moaning. Read the rest of this entry »
As much as I love their music, it wasn’t The New Pornographers who brought me to this show. It was the enigmatic pull of Okkervil River and their lead singer, Will Sheff, that drew me to the 9:30 Club last Monday. But twenty minutes before they was scheduled to go on stage, the club was barely a third full. I wasn’t expecting this, especially for a show sold-out long in advance, and a man standing in front of me recalled being offered over $100 for a $13 ticket when Okkervil River played at the Rock n’ Roll Hotel in September. It seemed clear that the majority of the audience was there for The New Pornographers, as the club filled up during the beginning of Okkervil River’s set.
Watching Will Sheff strutt about the stage, I couldn’t help but think of James Brown (admittedly a strange comparison for a white kid from New Hampshire). I recently saw a video of the first time that James Brown collapsed on stage and someone came out from the wings to drape a cape on him and escort him offstage. Before Brown had made it off, he threw off the cape and gave an encore to the now-hysterical audience. There were several songs during which Sheff collapsed to the ground as he played the last few chords on his guitar. A few seconds later, he would rise and rip and roar through the next song. Was it purely for show? Likely, but that doesn’t make it any less effective, just as Brown sent audiences into a tizzy with that cape routine until his very last show.
After Okkervil River’s set, The New Pornographers took the stage. I knew before that Destroyer (aka Dan Bejar) would be absent, gearing up for his own tour in support of his new album, but when The New Pornos took the stage, there was worse news; Neko Case had fallen ill and would not be performing.
So on this night, it was really The A.C. Newman Pornographers that were performing. They were far from bad, but they just seemed to be lacking something. While the absences were strongly felt, the band still managed to make the most of A.C. Newman’s birthday and played a very strong set list with songs from Challengers, their latest album, and older hits like “The Slow Descent into Alcoholism” and “Testament To Youth In Verse.”
By the end of their set, and the two subsequent encores, it was easy to see why they were the headliners. The power-pop ballads, which they do so well, even had me dancing (a sight to be seen, I promise). But as note-perfect as their hooks were, I would still prefer the messy, enthusiastic, and infectious rendition of “Westfall” that closed the Okkervil River set any day of the week.
It looks like Wilco may finally be ready to settle down—for now, at least. The latest incarnation of the band has been together for over three years and with Sky Blue Sky last year, Wilco decided to forgo their constant experimentation in favor of a straightforward though enjoyable folk/rock record. On Tuesday night at the 9:30 Club, Wilco’s comfort with their current situation shone through. Jeff Tweedy and Co., dressed in black button-downs (Tweedy added a tan cowboy hat to the ensemble), hit all the right notes as they made their way through the better part of Sky Blue Sky, along with twenty songs from older albums.
Tweedy calmly jigged about on stage, even during upbeat numbers as Nels Cline wildly wielded his guitar, looking like a man who has nothing to prove. When an audience member handed him a fake Grammy statue during a break between songs, his first reaction was to bite it (“making sure it’s not food,” he said). “Thanks for the Grammy,” he added. “We already decided we didn’t want one.” (Tweedy should have said “another one”; A Ghost is Born, released in 2005, won two Grammys.)
Critics who felt Sky Blue Sky lacked the innovation of earlier Wilco albums are right, but its simplicity showcases the sincerity of Tweedy’s songwriting. During “Side with the Seeds,” Tweedy looked as vulnerable and as his lyrics as he sang, “Well I’ll side with you … if you’ll side with me,” holding his hat to his heart and staring straight into the audience.
Not that he has to ask; Wilco has already built up a devoted following throughout the years that was in full force last night. The crowd requested obscure B-sides and sang along with older songs like “Summerteeth,” “War on War,” and “I Got You (At the End of the Century)”. Wilco’s popularity isn’t just confined to hardcore fans, either; they postponed their Feb. 29 show in Charleston, South Carolina to be able to perform on Saturday Night Live.
Wilco’s energy was present last night too, especially whenever one of Tweedy’s delicate songs would deconstruct into cacophonous turmoil, Cline’s riffs skidding over the noise of the band. But in some ways, the band was more toned down than usual. In previous shows in which that Wilco played “Misunderstood”, Tweedy would sing “I’d like to thank you all for nothing” and repeat “Nothing!” longer than seemed possible, the band stuck in a loop behind him. Last night, Tweedy chose a more hopeful refrain to pick up on: “We can make it better” from “Is That the Thanks I Get?” When the song ended, Tweedy made the political statement of the night, adding “The last section of that song is known as the Obama fight song.”
Wilco plays again tonight at the 9:30 Club. Good luck getting a ticket if you don’t already have one, though if you have a lot of spare cash lying around, this might be a good place to look.
You can check out Wilco’s almost complete setlist after the jump (it’s missing a few songs towards the end).
Although Bryan Scary wasn’t headlining, it was pretty clear that was whom most of the crowd filling the Rock and Roll Hotel on Saturday night was there to see. Looking a bit like Alice Cooper (the eyeliner helped), Scary put on a theatric stageshow, backed up by his stellar touring band, the jumpsuit-bedecked Shreading Tears. Maybe it was just the small space echoing the yells of die-hards; nevertheless, it’s pretty rare to hear a crowd respond to an opener with calls for an encore.
With props to accompany nearly every song in his epic saga of “aeronautics” from the forthcoming Flight of the Knife album (see the Voice’sreview), Scary’s high energy performance more than justified his reputation for superb live shows. The tale is patently ridiculous, involving mad scientists, aliens/astronauts (maybe?), a woman named Suzy and a young boy who dreams of an air flying machine—and immensely entertaining in its absurdity. It’s hard to tell if the story is truly tongue-in-cheek because Scary performs as each character with such sincerity that you want to believe him.
Although prog-rock is nothing new (see: the 1970s), Scary’s take on the rock opera blends musicianship with melodic songwriting—and benefits from intense, high volume performance. The squeaky clean mix on the record allows his brilliant songwriting to shine through, but at the cost of sounding a bit more rock musical than raucous, glam-inspired rock and roll.
Live, the band’s talent is beyond reproach as they navigate rapid fire key changes in typical prog-rock style, and thankfully avoid typical prog excesses by steering clear of too long songs with extended solos. Instead each number is packed with so many ideas that the “look-what-I-can-do” factor is minimized in favor of telling the story.
Oh, and did I mention the wicked guitarist of the Shreading Tears (Graham Norwood) is legally blind?
Murder Mystery opened for Bryan Scary and the Shreading Tears, playing a fairly mundane version of indie pop. Lead singer Jeremy Coleman sings a bit too much like Lou Reed, but can’t really pull it off—maybe Coleman should try singing off key a bit, and investing some energy into the performance. The band’s songs are jaunty and pleasant, heavily invested in the pop tradition and ultimately not that interesting. Mediocrity comes easy, and the band’s lack of energy was especially prominent in apposition with Bryan Scary.
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, a weekly newsmagazine at Georgetown University. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
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Starting Thursday night and rolling on through Sunday, Washington D.C. will be treated to a series of free (FREE!) concerts, courtesy of the 
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