Sunday, 24 February 2008

animal collective la tulipe



Animal Collective @ La Tulipe

Just a so-so night at La Tulipe unfortunately. I wasn't super familiar

with either of the opening acts, and was hoping for a nice little

surprise. Didn't quite turn out that way.

The first act, Barr, was a vaguely effeminate guy doing spastic spoken

word stuff over programmed tracks. Either he didn't know what he was

doing, or his machine kept fucking up on him, because it kept

switching tracks on him. Dude seemed really nervous, and it showed.

Could have potentially been interesting, but instead it ended up being

kind of a train wreck.

The second act, First Nation had some technical problems of their own.

Their electric congo drums or whatever they were weren't working at

first, which caused a bit of a delay. Once they finally got started,

the band put on a decent performance; kind of psychedelic, meditative

stuff. The real problem was the fact that the band had ZERO stage

presence. They hardly said a word to the audience throughout their

set, and just never seemed to be the least bit comfortable. I'm not

sure how used they are to playing in front of large groups of people,

but they need to work on engaging the audience.

The pressure was really on Animal Collective at this point to put on a

solid performance and salvage the evening. Thankfully they didn't

disappoint. The guys put on a solid, well-paced performance. The

transitions from one song to the next were perfect; the intensity

slowly rising until it would reach a breaking point, only to subside

before starting over. Aside from an unfortunate minor technical

problem during Grass, the band put on a pretty much flawless

performance, and the crowd was really into it.

On the whole, Animal Collective is more than worth the price of

admission, but I'd like to see them bring some better people along for

the ride. Like a double bill with Akron/Family or something. *drools*

posted by justin @ 1:35 PM 2 comments links to this post

2 Comments:

At 5:08 PM, Blogger Michael said...

that's sad you didn't like barr/he didn't have a good night. I

saw him last year and he was hilarious. his lyrics are just

like...running thoughts through his mind, and they're funny to

hear. sad he didn't have such a hot night.

At 6:39 PM, Blogger Au$10 said...

So, the Collective is at least almost as good as everyone says?

I can't wait for their ATL show...

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