Good Weather For Airstrikes

You know what, fuck it, I’m gonna come clean: I really don’t enjoy writing live reviews. I don’t know what it is, I’m just really not into it. And writing about CMJ just feels like bragging sometimes and I don’t really like how that comes across. Plus, I didn’t see anyone on Thursday or Friday that you haven’t already read about on this site (and every other one like it) thousands of times before. M.I.A. was a fucking party, as were Erol Alkan and MSTRKRFT (especially when they dropped “Da Funk” and their ill “D.A.N.C.E.” remix within ten minutes of each other), and Justice was honestly mind-blowing. Easily the best thing I’ve seen since Daft Punk in Hyde Park, which is no small feat considering LCD Soundsystem put on a pretty much flawless performance at Randall’s Island earlier this month.

A lot of this had to do with the fact that I’ve legitimately never seen a crowd so into a show. Even after the band had finished their encore and the house lights came on, the crowd hung around to scream out “We! Are! Your friends! You’ll! Never be alone again!” for a good ten more minutes, prompting the duo to come out and make one last curtain call from high up on the second-level balcony to roaring applause. Once out in the streets, people were pretty much just hanging around, still buzzing about the epic performance they’d just seen, when a car drove by pumping “We Are Your Friends” on the soundsystem and people just started dancing and belting out that chorus right there in the street. Shit was awesome. One thing though, I’d somehow managed to totally sleep on “DVNO” to this point until I totally woke up to it when they dropped it in their set on Saturday, so definitely get on that below if you’d made the same mistake I did. Also, did anyone stick around long enough at Studio B to see if Justice played that “secret” set that people had been whispering about all week? We were there for the first hour (maybe two, who even knows) of Erol Alkan’s set before we rolled out. We saw Xavier chilling in the background up in the DJ booth, but did he ever actually play? I’d be interested in hearing how it was if it actually happened/anyone saw it.

MP3: “DVNO” - Justice

Finally, I also caught Black Kids playing Brooklynvegan’s final day party at R Bar, which was apparently their only good show of the week. They’re performance was kind of cheesy (any mention of the word “heart” in their lyrics was always accompanied by keyboardist Ali making a little heart-shaped sign with her fingers and there were plenty more lame moves where that came from) and the lead singer came off as a bit of a prick at times, but I guess I might too if I’d spent the last four days being told by everyone in the industry that I was fronting the best band in the history of music ever (which is what seemed to be the consensus on Black Kids heading into the festival - they were the band to see). All that aside though, they put on a fucking great show. Most in attendance had only heard the four song demo available on their MySpace and I’ve got the full eight song version they sent to labels, and they still had great songs even beyond that. One track from the full-length demo that I haven’t seen hyped up nearly enough ’round the blogs is “Listen To Your Body Tonight, which totally slayed at R Bar on Friday. Ali takes lead vocals on this one and steals the show, but its that back-and-forth dialogue between her and Reggie towards the middle (”Hell-O?”, “Hello this is your body”, “What do you want my body?”, etc.) that totally rules despite the fact that it blatantly shouldn’t. Check it out below and sorry for any of those who wanted a full-fledged rundown like Part 1, but something tells me there aren’t very many of you included in that group.

MP3: “Listen To Your Body Tonight” - Black Kids ((highly recommended))

And I might as well take this time to address this issue: Apparently a lot of you are having trouble with the downloads? I’ve gotten a lot of complaints that the tracks often download only halfway or less before timing out, yet any time I try to download a file it always works fine without fail… So I’m not really sure what to do. Basically, how many of you are having this issue? And anyone have any ideas how I can fix it? Get at me in the comments.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 11:05 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.