November 10, 2008

White Lies w/ Japanese Motors. The Roxy, Los Angeles.

By Jake Anderson

I’ve been anticipating the release of Rock Band 2 for over a month now and when Max held it up to me at the Antics office on Thursday afternoon I squealed like a piglet. I’d grown so sick of the inaugural Rock Band that the last half dozen Antics events had found me belting out Robert Goulet tunes to drown out the nauseating choruses of “Say It Ain’t So”. The only song I could still tolerate was Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”, simply because the drumming is near impossible. Neil Peart is a vicious beast!

That night, in the Roxy parking lot, under the gaze of bewildered passers-by, I opened the door to Rock Band 2 and found myself on a beautiful green hill with a lovely breeze. Gone was “Say It Ain’t So” and “Creep”, gone was “Enter Sandman” and that incredibly annoying Yeah Yeah Yeahs song.  New songs had finally arrived, ready to be irrevocably destroyed by ceaseless repetition.  Pearl Jam’s “Alive”, Nirvana’s “Drain You”, “Aqualung”, “Psycho Killer"--songs by Dinosaur Jr., Jane’s Addiction, Interpol, Billy Idol, Megadeth.  I was in hog heaven. They even have “Eye of the Tiger” on there, which, frankly, is really weird to me. They also have that Duran Duran song “Hungry Like The Wolf”, which Andy Dick dances to in Old School.

It was painful to tear myself away and go inside, but I was glad I did because the Japanese Motors and White Lies were both very good. I had been nonplussed by some recordings of theirs earlier that day but was impressed by their live shows. Especially Japanese Motors, whose sound is like a stew of The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, and R.E.M. I assume the lead singer is being self-referential with his lyrics “Too hippie to be a punk, too punk to be a hippie.” The White Lies have a nice oaky texture that signifies a sophisticated maloactic fermentation; they’d be huge right now if they could only time travel back in time to before The Killers existed.

Posted at 9:00am
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