friday night i saw: the hong kong in the lower east side somewhere. i was sorta dreading being stuck in a room full of hipper-than-thou indie rockers, all decked out in silly hipster attire. but despite all that, the show was okay. they made up for their (what i'd diss as) simple songwriting it by rockin' it tight and LOUD. plus they had a singer both looked and sounded like blondie. they made it seem really easy to throw together a popular indie-rock band, given some 4-chord songs, good amplifiers, and a chick singer. oh, plus a usually-one-hand-only keyboard player and a manic dude with a tambourine.
saturday night i saw two great alt-country acts at the bowery ballroom, jim white and handsome family. both brett sparks of handsome family and jim white would make great contenders for the next johnny cash, with their dark songs about death, religion, and the like. brett and rennie sparks -- a real-life married couple with a cute spousal half-bickering on-stage patter -- even did a cover of a duet johnny and june (mr. and mrs. cash, that is) used to do.
one odd thing about that evening was the complete absence of real drums. jim white played solo, backing himself up with bass lines on a keyboard, pedal-activated samplers and a drum machine occasionally; handsome family was without a tour drummer, and had only brett sparks' apple powerbook providing the drum tracks. the songs were still great, though a little lifeless in comparison to the loud, live rock the night before -- this was especially evident when sparks had to restart the drum track after a false start, or when the drums kept robotically pushing on after the live players had finished the song. the two acoustic numbers they played sans powerbook as encore felt most expressive to me, possibly because they had the freedom to add rubato as they wished, instead of being pinned to the laptop's metronome accuracy.
all that having been said, i still want to get a powermac g5 and make crazy "laptop pop" with it. panther is finally shipping with new g5's, leaving my largest obstacle to getting one the price. anyone work at apple? i'll trade an IBM discount for an apple discount ...
Posted by cce at October 12, 2003 02:12 PM | TrackBackHa ha ha... if only IBM discounts didn't suck.
Oh wait, was I not supposed to give that away?
Posted by: Julian at October 13, 2003 09:48 PMshh! it rocks! it rocks more than my roommate's GE discount, at least.
Posted by: chris at October 15, 2003 11:57 PM