Good Weather For Airstrikes

Studio B, how I love you. Seriously, I’m yet to leave you feeling anything less than 1000% awesome when I emerge from your doors; your track record is flawless. Justice? RIDICULOUS. Girl Talk? RIDICULOUS. Shit, even the Throne of Blood party was an excellent time, and that was just a bunch of random DJ’s. Thus, it’s gotten to the point where I’ll go to Studio B for pretty much anything, and “Cobrastyle” was a good enough excuse in itself for me to make the trek out to Greene Point last night for Teddybears headlining gig at the venue, even though I wasn’t terribly familiar with anything else by them aside from “Yours To Keep” and “Punkrocker”. But man am I glad I did - shit was awesome.

We showed up at doors to make sure we could get tickets and then headed to The Palace, the pre-gaming spot for Studio B as far as I’m concerned about 10-15 blocks away at Nassau and Russell. This place is awesome. Why is it awesome? Because you can buy a round of three drinks for 4-fucking-50, incredible considering you can’t even buy one drink for that price anywhere in Manhattan. Furthermore, it’s populated exclusively by Pols and you can smoke cigarettes inside, but that’s really just icing on the cake. $4.50. Ridiculous. Anyway, we did some serious damage there before rolling out just in time to make it to Studio B as Radio 4 (who were opening I guess) were going off, and slid into the very front row thanks to the ease of navigation provided by the always-moving dancefloor driven by Studio B’s incredible resident DJ’s. I grabbed two more rounds and made my way back to the stage just as the ‘Bears took the stage wearing, yes, those awesome plastic bear heads. I love those things.

The next hour is more or less a blur of pure bliss and hot jams, with the two touring MC’s (some Sean Paul-lookin’ dude and a girl who I’m pretty sure looked exactly like M.I.A. if I remember correctly) doing a surprisingly excellent job of recreating the parts of their big name album counterparts. Three songs in they dropped “Cobrastyle” and it was easily one of the single most fun concert moments of my life, as the male MC owned the chorus and the ‘Bear directly in front of us rocked out hard in a power stance inches from our faces. Next came “Yours To Keep” and the introduction of the female MC, who did a serviceable job tackling Neneh Cherry’s impeccable vocals and kept the crowd into it. But it was the finale, “Punkrocker”, where she and the band both shined, throwing themselves into the crowd and going out on a brilliant ending note. All in all, an incredibly, incredibly fun night. Studio B just might be the greatest place on earth.

MP3s:
“Cobrastyle” - Teddybears ((highly recommended))
“Yours To Keep” (Annie Mix) - Teddybears
“Punkrocker” (Squeak E Clean Remix) - Teddybears

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Live Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.