Coachella 2009

Coachella 2009 is officially over. What an amazing experience to be in such a beautiful place with your friends listening to great music. This was not my favorite year at Coachella from an artist standpoint, but I will say that seeing The Presets and Ghostland Observatory filled a long-gestating concert void in my life.
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What made this Coachella so special was the unexpected moments and the ability to just "not really care" much about the world around me. This was worth the price of plane, hotel and concert alone. Life has been trying lately and I think that no one is exempt from this feeling. For the Coachie crew this year, it was a great way to keep our date with the polo field and push away any of the worldly cares. Not once did I check work email or turn on the television to find out what dismal news was infiltrating the nation.
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Coachella this year was not as much about the music as it was pure escape. Our group was small this time and we truly missed their presence. To be able to recap all of the events that happened during our trip would keep me way past my bedtime and I certainly want to be timely with this update. The story can easily be told through my Flickr sets which can be accessed by clicking the title of this post above.
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Ladytron and CSS, The Club at Firestone, Orlando, Florida

poster by Betamike

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Hitting the clubs again for a second day in a row, I feel like a beat up Michael Alig Happy Meal toy in the worst way, of course this is coming the day after. Last night was indeed amazing!
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Highly anticipated since it was their first time in Orlando, Ladytron supersized themselves from their original location of the Social to the Club at Firestone somehow having the predilection of knowing that as amazing as The Social would be to see the haughty ice queens of darktronica, it could by no means hold the one two punch of both their sprawling set-up nor their energetic opening band CSS.
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At first I was a little dismayed at the venue change but after thinking about it, Firestone has ample space and pretty nifty backdrop (an old tire factory...c'mon!) but the sheer wall of sound that even 1/2 of Ladytron could produce in a venue like The Social makes me automatically want to "What if" this thing to death. Never the less, a bigger venue also means about 1,000 more inebriated rubberneckers and Firestone Thursday regulars who either were like "WTF!!" or found themselves on the receiving end of a pretty damn good aural attack.
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Opening up for Ladytron straight out of the hype caboose like a thousand sexed up kittens scratching their way out of a neon pink and gold spandex bag was the Brazilian Cansei de Ser Sexy (CSS) who you may have or certainly have already been rocking out to with their "Let's Make Love to Death From Above 1979". Fronted by Lovefoxxx (eh,really!) who is exactly a combination of a Sugarcubes-era Bjork with the inhibition of an any-era Margaret Cho, CSS is a party band. Let me say this again...a-l-c-o-h-o-l induced take-your pants off party band! With songs like "Art Bitch," "Meeting Paris Hilton" and...awww, fuck it, watching lead singer Lovefoxx jump in circles around the stage making fuck me eyes at just about everyone not afraid to make eye contact back at her was thrilling enough. Mind you, before I realized that under her tie-died shirt was actually flesh colored spandex (which was in a perpetual state of on-off like some sort of clothing light switch) I braced myself for "Uh oh, a real Brazilian wax!" but I am not sure the alternative made me grimace any less. Not familiar with their entire oeuvre, I was immediately thrown into a swirl of kicking myself in the ass for not listening to more of their album as soon as they took the stage. Their sound is exactly what I love about electronic-tinged pop music. It's sharp and funny and brutally irreverent. Ultimately it was such a joyous experience being right down in the front for such an energetic band, hand clapping and sexying myself up quite a bit. And who doesn't love a band that comes out and shouts first thing "It must be Thursday because last night was Project Runway!"
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You could just as well call this tour the night and day tour as the differences between such a high energy band (think 3 pixie sticks below the sugar high of The Go! Team) and the haute couture sonic dark musings of a band like Ladytron. I am not going to waste a lot of words on the Ladytron show here since I have about 100 photos to go through and post suffice it to say that they put on a superb set with them playing every single song that I wanted them to ("CMYK" would have been nice though). I don't mean to undercut them by giving them less text but if you know who or what Ladytron sounds like, there you have their show. Not to say that you don't take away anything from seeing them live, but besides a constantly running video screen in the background, you can only really say so much at the marvelous job they do at producing their sound live in front of you without any special gimmicks. Having only been about 8 sweaty bodies back at Coachella, my spot last night was even better, the holy grail of being right up front against the Marshall Stacks having paid the price early on of putting up with two pseudo lesbians during CSS's set. I can only tell you here how good electronic music is while suckling on the teet of a speaker mere inches in front of your face because I certainly could not hold an intelligible conversation about it today. The leftover static fuzz is quite nice however and I'm beginning to enjoy it.
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I cannot begin to explain how excited I still am that we got to experience Ladytron right here in Orlando because by far, they are one of my favorite bands and cold fish stage presence aside, and I can say I quite like that also in a school marm kind of way, I haven't had my ass kicked this much at a concert since I lost my first set of ear cilia at the Jesus and Mary Chain show, my first rock concert ever. My apologies to all involved as well on this seemingly half-ass posting as I am still drunk on sound, if that is possible. Let's say yes!
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• My Ladytron/CSS Flickr Photo set [the best of the rest of the pics from last night]

• My Ladytron Youtube videos
  

• Ladytron [band's website]

• Add Ladytron to your MySpace friends

• Ladytron on Wikipedia

• Add CSS to your MySpace friends

• CSS on Wikipedia

Art Brut - We Are Scientists - The Spinto Band @ The Social, Orlando, Florida

poster by Betamike

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Flashback to April of this year and a svelt (more so than today) Betamike was boogying down to the fey glam pop sounds of Scissor Sisters in the California desert and having a damn good time... watching not only Jake Shears in his limited edition gold foil jumper jog endlessly in place mind you but taking in the visceral sight of 5,000 or so smushed-up bodies that were caught up in the glitter bomb that eminated from the stage.
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Slow forward to about a day later reading the press surrounding this year's Coachella concert and word of dueling expositions of equal critical weight. On one end, the much lauded and "louded" public affair that I attended and on the other end of the polo field, an up and coming band so artsy that they called themselves, well....Art Brut closing down the Mojave tent in what one would assume to be a dauntless and unforgiving task, trying to soak up any revelers away from mainstays Tool or the one-two combination of The Go! Team and the Scissor Sisters. Given the fact that I felt sorry for The Editors earlier in the eveing having caught them in Orlando before the festival play to a measely half filled tent, I should have given greater attention to Art Brut's slot and their no-less significant place there. In retrospect, a golden opportunity to catch such a great band instead of taking my esteemed place far enough back at a much more prolific group's set so crowded that I have only just now realized that the belt marks around my waist were not my own.
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Art Brut, by all counts, shut the place down. Not only in a literal sense because, well....so did Tool and Scissor Sisters and that one half-conscious drunk girl shouting "Crazy" being drug to her car, but in the sense that everyone who saw them claimed to have a size 11 imprint of lead singer Eddie Argos's foot on their backside, in short, they kicked every sunburnt ass in the Mojave tent. But who knew? Art Brut. Really?
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Yesterday, I was able to see what the fuss was about along with two other bands I had never seen, We Are Scientists and The Spinto Band. The latter I had never heard of but judging by the pleasant sound of their music not and eagerness to please the crowd, you should be able to find them readily available on your next venture to any so-and-so Pitchafit music blog or another. Lead singer Nick Krill is next up to spot-on play David Byrne in a remake of Stop Making Sense and bassist Thomas Hughes (who also bills himself as poopship on the band's website) somehow manages to manipulate the very Kimchi Ready-Whip that powers every kid in the place. We Are Scientists are a band who my friend Stephanie adored the last time they were here and who I have casually enjoyed from my couch whenever I have had the opportunity to see one of their brilliant videos. I've actually blogged about this before I think but if you want something smart, witty, hilarious, unexpected, and much welcomed to read, go on over to the Scientists website and check it out, great stuff! A fan of bands like Soul Coughing and They Might Be Giants, We Are Scientists are savvy rockers but gentlemen-rockers none the less and harder than I really expected. Live they were somewhere between tasting dry Kool-Aid right out of the packet and eating a partially solidified cake of powdered sugar ... if it were to mix finally....and brilliantly in your stomach. Not exactly what I expected live. They played very well, a little harder than I possibly imagined but less than impressionable as I had hoped as it seemed the witty banter I had saved room for in my noggin was nothing compared to the 45 minute intellectual storm that Eddie Argos and company had brought with them.
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Famous last words are a very funny thing. It was no more than a few minutes before Art Brut took the stage that I was professing my complete ignorance about and arrogrance toward Eddie Argos's talky-singy (singy-talky?) style of delivery in the exactly three songs that I had heard from them before last night. Such proclimations should really be left at home especially if you also profess to only hearing three songs before that evening. It wasn't even so much the fact that he didn't sing (even he professes not to in "Formed A Band") but the fact that indeed each song is so well crafted from a storytellers perspective and half lived-out on stage in front of you that allows you to buy into the bottled product that Art Brut are selling. Personal, enlightened, well-intentioned...all themes...no, adjectives that can be used to describe the song writing. Delivery of course is another thing as well. If at first I detested what I assumed would be a boring lecture of a rock show (who half sings an entire set anyway?), I now consider my glorious, swaggering Sylvia Plath. The man responsible for making me actually stand up and pay attention to what the hell was going on on-stage for the first time in a long time. I was actually concerned about his little brother discovering rock and roll! Emily Kane?...a complete bitch! Moving to L.A. sounds like such a great idea! Especially if you can drink Hennessy with Morrissey! All of these strange thoughts and themes that shouldn't be rotating around together in a concert set all seem perfectly tied together because Eddie makes them spin so well. Like a brilliant art mobile.
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A day later (and a big thanks to technology) those same brilliantly painted stories were still floating around in the collective heads of me and my friends. Instant messages with phrases like "Art Brut, are you ready?" and "Popular culture no longer applies to me." I suppose that is the real test of a band making an impression, popular culture actually transcends them and there they are, memorable, quotable and yes....singable a day later.
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• Art Brut [band website]

• [Add Them To Your MySpace]

• We Are Scientists [band website]

• [Add Them To Your MySpace]

• The Spinto Band [band website]

• [Add Them To Your MySpace]