Lykke li - Tripod 16/04/2011

I must admit I spied the table of good looking people before I knew who they were when I walked into Green 19 on Saturday to meet my friends for a quick pre-gig dinner. I tried not to look but there were at least four or five tall, blonde ridiculously attractive males. 'That's Lykke Li' my friend whispered. Craning my head around in my most subtle attempt I saw the pretty little Swede nursing an esspresso amid these chisled Scandinavian models, I mean band members. Everybody at their table was dressed head to toe in black. As they all got up to go, slinking out in a sea of leather and dirty blonde hair I couldn't help be reminded of the Buffy episode (nerd alert) when Xander became part Hyena, and accumulated a posse of sexy, bad, cool people. Skulking around in black, being all... cool 'n' stuff.

Turns out this was all part of a bigger plan. Lykke Li's stage in Tripod is theatrical, eerie, slightly menacing and very black. With long black drapes, smoke and a whole-lotta drums. Why have one sexy drummer when you can have two.

Lykke Li is gorgeous, dressed like a vampy witch, but in a good way and occasionally disappears behind the drapes, reappearing dramatically banging the symbols by her side. She's a confident performer and a slick little dancer but her new album is full of much slower, sadder songs than before ('Sadness is my boyfriend'-Aww, bless) and are somewhat drowned out in this venue. At times the levels of chat border on embarrassing.

'Most people scream and shout at this part' she teases before one song, and the crowd kick into gear a little. There were many having a great night however, the guy next to me knows all the words to every song and nearly has a conniption, jumping up onto his friends shoulders for the hit song 'Get Some'.

While I am not a huge fan of her music it was a nice and sultry gig that hovered somewhere between fun and dark but perhaps would've been better served up in a smaller venue or with a more focused audience.

James Blake -Whelans gig

I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the sold out James Blake Whelan's gig a few weeks back. I didn't pick the best spot, stuck as I was behind three very tall men. I wonder what the gig etiquette of tall people is? Should they be limited to one tall friend each per gig? I think this needs to be explored.

From the short glimpses I managed to steal he looks like quite the posh English public school boy, tall, neat, with a short choppy hair style airing on the quiffy side. What a whopper of a voice though. Surprisingly powerful and soulful. If you couldn't see him, and I couldn't, you could certainly feel him. The gorgeous and heartbreaking emotion in his voice on songs like 'I never learnt to share' and 'Why don't you call me'.

And if the emotion didn't get to you then the vibrations certainly did. The bass and dubstep rhythms passed straight though your bones, washing over you, shaking your very being. All there was to do was be still, listen and feel. Very soothing actually, almost numbing to your ears with the air being palpable and thick with sound.

Then there was 'that' Fiest cover, 'Limit to your love'. Worth the wait when it finally came, teasing us at parts with extra long breaks, leaving us waiting for the piano hook to return. No encore for us, sure wouldn't that be greedy?

The Naked and Famous - Button Factory gig (March 5th)

'Sold out? WTF!?' Says an incredulous Thom Powers to the packed out Button Factory on Saturday March 5th. New Zealand's five piece, The Naked and Famous were touring their electro-pop/rock outfit ahead of the release of their debut album, 'Passive me, aggressive you'. Should he really have been surprised though? Their single 'Young Blood' debuted at number one in the New Zealand charts last year and was on heavy rotation in this hemisphere on radio along with equally strong singles 'Punching in a dream' and 'All of this'. They were also featured on the BBC sounds of 2011 list.

They were an interesting looking bunch and to blatantly pigeon-hole their style there's a nerd, a jock, a pretty indie girl, a rock n roll drummer and ... a mullet haired 70's style rocker. They got straight down to business and offering up early on a few of their singles, 'All of this' and 'Punching in a dream' to an ecstatic crowd, singers Thom Powers and Alisa Xayalith sharing the vocals mostly in unison over their pumped up synth-pop.

It's clear these antipodeans are talented in the art of writing summery anthem-like songs, with 'Young Blood' being the penultimate. Instantly recognisable intro leading you in, building the excitement, then they hit you with the sugary electro-pop with just enough guitar and thumping bass to rock out to and with a catchy, sing-a-longable chorus. They could probably boast the best use of the word 'yeah' this side of hip hop, breathing new life into what is the most commonly used and meaningless lyric filler. A perfect and uplifting crowd pleaser.

Though they're great at melting into dreamy echos not all their tracks achieve the same dizzy heights as the upbeat numbers so they may need to pull another few gems out of the bag and be wary not to disappear under some of the more subdued tracks where the use of high pitched, floaty but muted vocals can get a bit sam-ey. Basically a can we have a little less of the passive and a bit more of that lovely aggression.

Hercules & Love Affair - ruin St Patricks day

Booo to Hercules & Love Affair for cancelling their Paddy's day gig at the Button Factory. I was looking forward to doing something more interesting this year than just hitting the pubs in town along with half the population of Dublin. I even had a ridiculously glitzy outfit picked out that would only really do for a Hercules & Love Affair gig that's supported by Bitches with Wolves. Now I am just going to look silly down at the local.

Restrepo

I watched the brilliant documentary "Restrepo" on the weekend by photographer Tim Hetherington and the journalist Sebastian Junger. They follow the day to day lives of a platoon of American soldiers in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan in 2007. A place so dangerous that they faced daily and numerous gun battles, so dubbing the valley the 'most dangerous place on earth'. The alien landscape renders them open targets much of the time, never knowing when the next attack will be. They manage to gain ground and build a small fort which they name 'Restrepo' after one of their own men who dies shortly after arriving.

The tension they face everyday is unbearable, the cameras capture them truckin' on regardless becoming a sort of family in the process. We are shown a disturbingly realistic portrayal of army life including a chilling gun battle where they are almost helpless amid the trees and hilly terrain when they are ambushed by the Taliban, losing one of their best soldiers in the process.

This documentary is really about post-traumatic disorder though and it's heartbreaking to see these young men trying to make sense of what they have seen and though they do not question why they are there we cannot help but feel angry for senseless waste of life on what seems like a doomed mission from the start.

A call to arms

I wish my sister Leah would take some more of her beautiful photos. This one below is one of my favourites and is of my other sister Ellen taken in my old apartment. Ellen has always been the dancer of us three. She used to do ballet when she was younger and you can still tell from her slender shoulders and movements. Leah is definitely the feminist dancer of us though, she likes to dance but there will be absolutely no 'look at me, look at me' sexy moves, much more contemporary is she, or is it old school ... Her friend once told me that Leah's her favourite dancer as she doesn't dance like she wants people to watch her, like so many do. While I hate the way female pop stars gyrate in their videos myself and Ellen are guilty of the most disgusting dancing years ago to annoy and freak Leah out.  We would blare out Wu Tang, Dre and songs like Mary J Blige's 'Family affair'. This was when she listened mainly to Manu Chao and Lemon Jelly. I think she was very ashamed. We did this ALL the time. That was also one of the first times I met Ellen's boyfriend. He had come around the back of the house to park his bike and saw me grinding through the kitchen window, trying to make Leah puke, doing the tackiest bump n grind dancing I could muster. So I clearly wasn't going for the cool first impression.

In So Many Ways - Computer Magic

I can't stop listening to this lovely lady that I saw listed on the Nialler9 blog.