Posts Tagged ‘930 Club’
Thievery Corporation @ 9:30 Club In January
Thievery Corporation will be playing three nights at the 9:30 Club. This is becoming a January tradition for the classy, dubby duo. They will be spinning their haunted downtempo tunes on Jan 21, 22, and 23. Tickets go on sale Thursday at 10 a.m.
Photos: Lamb of God @ 9:30 Club
The 9:30 Club hosted a local-ish metal blowout on Thursday: Lamb of God (Richmond), Darkest Hour (D.C.), Periphery (Bethesda) and This or the Apocalypse (Lancaster, PA). The seriously high-energy performances were matched by one of the most active, enthusiastic crowds I’ve ever seen at a D.C. show.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
All Is Strange in Love and Pop: El Perro del Mar @ 9:30 Club
It’s one thing to write a break-up record. But recording it while your ex looks on?
“The songs were an actual communication, because he was very present,” says Sarah Assbring, referring to the recording sessions for Love Is not Pop, her latest album as El Perro del Mar. She built a studio in Gothenburg, Sweden, several years ago with her then boyfriend, and although they broke up over a year ago, he’s still the sound engineer. “He was more or less looking me in the eye while I was doing the vocals.”
Awash in echo and atmosphere, Love Is not Pop is a remarkably spacey album for an artist who cut her teeth making sweet, sad, girl-group-sounding indie pop. Lyrically, though, the record is grounded. When Assbring sings lines like “We’ve been together for so long/I gotta get smart” and “It is something to have wept as we have wept,” she says, she means every crestfallen syllable.
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Photos: In Flames @ 9:30 Club
What a difference a year makes: last December, Swedish death metal icons In Flames were blown off the stage by their opening band (Gojira) in Baltimore; last May, North Carolinian prog-metallers Between the Buried and Me played to a disinterested audience of Dream Theater fans at DAR Constitution Hall. On Monday at a packed 9:30 Club, BTBAM satisfied a crowd full of fans screaming, “You guys should headline this tour!” while In Flames more than matched BTBAM, with exponentially more energy than they had at that Baltimore show last winter.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
Things Shaun Ryder Has Said: Happy Mondays @ 9:30 Club Tonight
Never mind its status as an icon of Madchester and forerunner of Britpop. Happy Mondays remains in easy contention for another rock superlative: rudest fookin’ band. The drugged-up, blissed-out Mancunians made some pretty memorable, influential music around the late ’80s and early ’90s (see especially Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches), but mostly they earned notoriety for frontman Shaun Ryder’s antics: a very public heroin addiction, explosive comments, several threats made with unloaded guns. The band fell apart in the early ’90s, and Ryder went on to form Black Grape. Since then, he’s reformed the Mondays twice, in 1999 and in 2007. (The current incarnation stops at the 9:30 Club tonight with another great ’80s band, Pyschedelic Furs, and Islands.) All the while, Ryder—once a thuggish, pranksterish lothario—has remained insanely quotable. After the jump, some of his better bon mots.
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Tonight in Music: Between the Buried and Me at the 9:30 Club
North Carolina’s Between the Buried and Me is a prog-metal band in the most time-honored sense of the word “prog.” The group does nothing subtly; Why write a simple four-minute song when it could be extended to 10 minutes by throwing in snippets of every musical genre imaginable? (Why yes, that is in fact a country & western hoedown in their popular song “Ants of the Sky.”) This approach has doomed many bands, but Between the Buried’s best songs evoke a sense of epic scope and grandeur while maintaining an element of suspense. —Brandon Wu
Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.
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Photos: Ra Ra Riot @ 9:30 Club
Considering the group only has one full-length album to its name, Ra Ra Riot brought an impressively enthusiastic audience to a sold-out 9:30 Club last night. The Syracuse indie-pop sextet put on a show better than its album would lead one to expect—the hour-long set was just enough to leave fans wanting more.
Photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
Photos: The Sounds @ 9:30 Club
The Sounds frontwoman Maja Ivarsson doesn’t need the hot pants and high heels that are her trademark schtick: she’s a dynamic, engaging performer regardless of what she’s wearing. The energy that she brought to the 9:30 Club last night more than made up for a few vocal misfires.
Quote of the night: “Oh my god, don’t you just want to have sex with them?” from an enthusiastic female fan to a 9:30 Club staff member.
More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.
Lover’s Rock: Yo La Tengo @ 9:30 Club, Matt & Kim @ Black Cat
Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, of Hoboken, N.J.’s Yo La Tengo, are married. Despite the rumors, Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino, better known as the Brooklyn band Matt & Kim, are not.
At Matt & Kim’s sold-out show at the Black Cat Wednesday, Schifino showed off what has to be indie pop’s most expressive face, while Johnson—with his Von Trapp good looks and overstimulated banter—spent half of the band’s hyperactive set pogoing on his stool. No drums-and-keys duo is more animated and entertaining, nor more modest, nor more, well, annoying. The set was all minute-long brat-pop nuggets and synthed-up arena themes (”Rock And Roll Part 2,” “The Final Countdown,” ODB’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”), and the crowd (youngish) ate it up. As for me, it was hard to begrudge Johnson and Schifino their success: They were too adorable.
Kaplan and Hubley (along with their bandmate James McNew) offer little in the way of body language. A shared smile and a quip from Kaplan after the couple forgot the lyrics to a Beach Boys cover (”Farmer’s Daughter”) was about all the physical rapport on display at a sold-out 9:30 Club last night. Here was a headier affair, and a nerdier one: Yo La Tengo opened with an acid test (”Here To Fall”), continued with 10-plus minutes of deep drone and blissed-out harmonies (”More Stars Than There Are In Heaven”), dug deep into its repertory (covers of Black Flag and Half Japanese), and even deeper into its celebrated discography (I counted a half-dozen crowd-pleasers, give or take).
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Photos: Yo La Tengo @ 9:30 Club
Jon Fischer will be recapping last night’s Yo La Tengo show at the 9:30 Club. In the meantime, check out some photos from the evening after the jump and at the full gallery.
