photo courtesy of Drake LeLane

October 4, 2006 at The Showbox

Stage left, there is a slightly overweight man holding a guitar, chest-hair creeping from his worn V-neck. He has an afro that’s at least a foot high and a voice that may be two octaves higher than my personal falsetto range. Stage right – often stepping back to the amp to hit some more feedback into his guitar – is a fellow with shortly cropped yellow hair, yellow Bono-ish glasses and a very form-fitting black shirt made out of something like Spandex. He doesn’t just “play” guitar; he strums it with methodical insanity, as if the fate of the world depends on it. The bassist/keyboardist is strangely cut-off from the stage, hanging out at the far back left, glancing off every so often in the direction of the drummer. I’m not so sure the band even knows he’s there.
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If you’re in LA this Friday, come on down to Tangier where Fonogenic will be throwing an awesome party. Live bands include Pink and Noseworthy, Hour of the Shipwreck, and Portland Orgeon’s Horsefeathers. Horsefeathers is making their first SoCal appearance… they have been getting a ton of the old blog-o-buzz so be the first on your block to check em out. Also, DJ robot Mark (Music For Robots) will be behind the decks and that guy is a funky freaky machine, so you won’t want to miss it.

2 FREE TICKETS to the first people in LA to email usounds AT gmail DOT com !! Do it now!

It’s just the intro, so don’t get too excited, but still it’s nice to see Danger Mouse dressed up as the Tin Man and Cee Lo as the Lion.

Phoenix have a new album out on May 23rd, called It’s Never Been Like That, you can listen to some of it on MySpace, and the band will support it with the following world tour, including a mini-tour in the States:
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The Walkmen are inexplicably not playing in Los Angeles on their North American tour. Clearly a mistake was made somewhere, some clueless manager (the type who proclaims Boston “not a big College town”) or label apparatchik bungled the entire schedule and this is the sad result. Or, could it be that Hamilton Leithauser is scared of coming face-to-face with the toughest interviewer in his career? We’ll probably never know.

In other Walkmen news, Leithauser had this to say about the new album, due May 23 “”We’re all very proud of this. I think it runs about 42 minutes, and its much more solid than the last record. There are no dips, so it is very different in that regard. We’ve always been pretty heavy, and this seems a little lighter. I mean, it still sounds like the same band. But it has a lot less organ involved.”

Walkmen Tourdates are here