TV On The Radio w/ The Noisettes @ Vassar
Thanks Vassar, for reminding me that, hey, college is fucking fun. Sure, it helps when you have one of the best bands in the world rocking your student body to their very core, as TV on the Radio did in brilliant form last week, but yeah, thanks for everything Vassar. I made the beautiful two hour train ride up to Poughkeepsie last Saturday to visit Lizzy and catch TV on the Radio’s show with the Noisettes, and man, am I glad I did. I didn’t really know what to expect from a show that was held in what was essentially a glorified student lounge, but props to ViCE (Vassar College Entertainment) for making it work and also to the Vassar kids for being a ridiculously awesome audience. UVA got great shows all the time (Feist, Jose Gonzalez, Les Savy Fav, Architecture in Helsinki… the list goes on), but the audience was largely comprised of the cooler-than-thou artsy 20-somethings that populate downtown Charlottesville instead of actual UVA students. Last night, on the other hand, the crowd was made up nearly exclusively of Vassar kids, sneaking sips from water bottles full of vodka (just us?) and preparing to have the time of their lives.
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When I spoke with Kele Okereke on the topic of great new British bands at the Ed Banger show a few weeks back, he called the Noisettes his “favorite band in England at the moment”. Obviously, I checked them out as soon as I got home and loved what I heard, and thus was thrilled to hear that they’d be opening for TVotR at Vassar. They didn’t disappoint. At all. In fact, think of the exact opposite of “disappointed”, multiply it by 1,000 and you’re only beginning to get a rough idea of how much they impressed me. They even came damn close to justifying the Guardian’s bold assertion that the Noisettes “are the best live band in Britain”, so yeah, they were like real good. Lead singer Shingai Shoniwa is a fucking superstar in the making, and she did an incredible job working the crowd despite the fact that outside of my group of friends, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a single person in attendance who’d ever heard the band’s name, let alone their music. Shoniwa owned the room, prancing around the stage, climbing up on the speakers and working the kids into a frenzy like she was Ninja from the Go! Team and had just overdosed on awesome pills. She’s also like, really really good-looking and a damn fine guitar player as well, so yeah – this one’s the complete package.
They opened with “Bridge to Canada”, perhaps the only dull moment of their entire set, before launching into recent singles “Don’t Give Up” and “Scratch Your Name”. “Don’t Give Up” set the high-energy tone for the evening right off the bat, with a central riff that’s infective and danceable enough to carry an iPod commercial and a huge chorus that was more than enough to make sure everyone in attendance had their eyes glued to the stage for the remainder of their set. “Scratch Your Name”, the band’s most recent single, is an uplifting track with a motivational chorus punctuated by emphatic, stabbing guitar riffs and sounded awesome in the live setting. Debut single “Iwe” was excellent also despite being one of my least favorite tracks by the band on record, but it was “The Count of Monte Cristo”, my favorite song of theirs, that was the true highlight of their set. A departure from the heavier, more rocking sound of the rest of their debut, “The Count of Monte Cristo” is a more soulful, almost jazzy number that almost recalls KT Tunstall at times and makes its money on the call-and-return vocals of its brilliant chorus. They closed in flawless fashion with “Sister Rosetta (Capture The Spirit)” before the proverbial curtain fell on a truly incredible performance that undoubtedly won them an entire room full of new fans. Having just released their debut, What’s The Time Mr. Wolf, on Universal Motown (yeah… Motown) in the US, look for the Noisettes to do big thing in 2007 and for Shoniwa’s star to continue to rise as she dazzles audiences across the globe on a regular basis.
Download two of the many standout tracks from the LP below, along with a sufficiently bangin’ remix of new single “Scratch Your Name” (which sees release for a second time on May 7th) courtesy of the Baseball Furies.
MP3s:
“Don’t Give Up” - The Noisettes
“The Count of Monte Cristo” - The Noisettes ((highly recommended))
“Scratch Your Name” (Baseball Furies Remix) - The Noisettes
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TV on the Radio took the stage a bit later than scheduled around 10:45 and had the kids freaking out from the get-go. The sound and stage set-up wasn’t nearly as good as when I saw the band at the 9:30 Club last fall (but I mean, that’s to be expected), but the incredible crowd more than made up for it and the show proved to be my best TVotR live experience yet. “Young Liars” and “The Wrong Way” kicked off the night and the crowd loved every minute of the show from the very beginning. “Dreams” and “Province” provided early highlights, but shit just got absolutely crazy when “Wolf Like Me” dropped five songs in. At the 9:30 show last fall there were a lot of crossed-arms and shifting from foot to foot before “Wolf Like Me” hit and sent a considerable portion of the audience into a frenzy, and while the Vassar kids were way into it from the first note last week, “Wolf Like Me” took everything to a whole new level of high octane out-rocking. We’re talking like, full-fledged floor shaking and shit. “Dirtywhirl”, my original favorite track off of Cookie Mountain, kept the energy up and the kids moving, as did “I Was A Lover” and a rousing rendition of B-side favorite “Dry Drunk Emporer”. “Satellite” capped off the main set brilliantly and made me fall in love with it all over again after largely neglecting the Young Liars EP for the last year or so.
The main set was great, but the encore was really something special. Opening innocently enough with “A Method”, the band then invited the Noisettes and company out to join them for the next track, an absolutely ridiculous rendition of “Let The Devil In”. To call the performance “rousing” would be like calling Katrina breezy, the hurricane reference a fitting one considering the sheer unbridled force packed by the band’s penultimate performance for the evening. The Noisettes improvised percussion sections on anything they could get their hands on, Dave Sitek helped out drummer Jaleel Bunton pounded out ship-sinking rhythms on the drum kit and Tunde Adebimpe screamed the chorus through a megaphone to a blown-away audience. But it was closer “Staring At The Sun” that set the high-water mark for excellence that evening. Originally recorded with an electronic drum machine, Jaleel infuses the track with an astonishing vitality not found on record in the live setting. Things even reached “Wolf Like Me”-proportions, with the floorboards pulsating once again under the sheer force of hundreds of jumping kids. All good things must and do come to an end though, and the band hit the dressing room after the songs final notes rang out over a considerably awe-struck audience.
MP3s:
“Satellite” - TV On The Radio
“Staring At The Sun” (EP Version) - TV On The Radio ((highly recommended))
“Dirtywhirl” - TV On The Radio
“Wolf Like Me” - TV On The Radio ((highly recommended))
“Staring At The Sun” (Diplo’s Hollertronix Remix) - TV On The Radio
“Staring At The Sun” - The Subways
After the show I helped Lizzy, our dear friend Kira and the rest of the ViCE crew load out the band’s equipment and take apart the stage. Earlier that day Lizzy had been giving the job of walking TVotR’s drummer, Jaleel, across campus to where he could find a shower. They hit it off quite well - because Lizzy’s fly like that - and before parting ways he expressed a desire to hit up a college party after the show. Lizzy didn’t really take it seriously, but sure enough Jaleel popped out of his dressing room and told us to retrieve him from the tour bus after we were done.
We went out to the bus about an hour later where Jaleel, who proved to be one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, was kickin’ it with Gerard (keys/bass/knob-twiddling/auxiliary percussion). We chilled there for a bit and enjoyed some beer and cigarettes, discussing film with the band (unanimously agreeing that Notes on a Scandal was the best film of last year), half-paying attention to The Descent (which was playing on the bus’s nice ass flat-screen… Dave’s two word review: ‘too screamy’) and generally reveling in the company of our idols. Shortly thereafter we rolled out with Jaleel, feeling like the coolest kids on the block (nay, the universe) as countless passersby offered shouts of endless praise for Jaleel and the band in general. After stopping by a fizzled out party or two, we rolled over to the crib of ViCE chair Jeremy Robinson (aka DJ Half Price aka the dropper of hot jams), who kept the party hot on the 1’s and 2’s (how long I’ve waited to use that phrase) well until the early hours of the morning. And so there we were, partying, making hard lemonades and cutting a rug with the drummer of one of the most talented bands in the world like it wasn’t no thing. This just in: it was very much a thing, and it very well just might have been one of the best nights of my life.
While his playlist drew heavily from mainstream hip-hop staples last Saturday, DJ Half Price has also displayed a considerable proficiency for mash-ups, dropping the following jams over the course of the evening. Both are sufficiently ill, with Half Price reinventing Hot Chip’s “My Piano” and New Order’s “Bizzare Love Triangle” with a new hip-hop flavor. I’ll be honest, I can’t say I’d heard either of the hip-hop tracks involved here, but I can tell you these mash-ups are at least 15 different kinds of hot.
MP3s:
“Get Down With My Piano” - Hot Chip vs. Busta Rhymes
“Bizarre Love Panties” - New Order vs. Young Blaze
We capped off an incredible evening sharing a joint with the Jaleel, Kyp Malone and Dave “I smoke a pound of weed a month” Sitek in what was perhaps the single most surreal experience of my life. Suffice it to say, shit was bananas. Sometimes life is good.
In somewhat related news, Lizzy and Kira have their own radio show that airs on Vassar’s WVKR every Tuesday night/Wednesday morning from 2-4 AM. These are some severely awesome girls we’re talking about here, and their playlists are every bit as consistently fantastic as they are. Plus, we’re into like, exactly the same shit and their playlists often draw heavily from GWFAS-approved material, so if you were ever interested in hearing what Good Weather For Airstrikes were like if turned into a radio show, then be sure to hit up the streaming audio at WVKR.org Tuesday nights at 2. I mean, it’s exam week (you need this) and doesn’t everyone love attractive girls with good record collections?