Artist: Prefuse 73 & Icy Demons
Venue: Bowery Ballroom, NYC, NY
Date: December 1, 2005
Prefuse 73 gets frequent comparisons to Four Tet, but I like to think of them as yin and yang. Four Tet has the better music (”folk-tronica” if you wanna call it that) and albums (Rounds is one of the most cohesive and well-put-together albums I’ve ever heard), Prefuse has the better ideas (”hip-hop-tronica” since no one’s coined that term yet) and concerts (this one). But first, the opener:
Icy Demons. These guys rocked out pretty hard. In the yin-yang analogy, these guys would be the, uh…well these guys are good, is what they are. “Jazz-tronica” with a side of weirdish melodies and a drummer who drums at 200 beats per minute but makes facial expressions at 500 expressions per minute. With the main singer looking like the educated leader of a black power movement and a couple of kids who look like they’re in a college jazz-band expertly playing the mallets and sax, this band’s got style, personality, and a great sound. They also have an album (actually two I think), and I bought that album straightaway after the show.
After such a thrilling opener, I got nervous about how Prefuse would do. It turns out, there was no need to…although this was billed as a “special performance” by him, I would like to believe that all his shows are this good. He had a second drummer who was just in his own world the whole show [and a damn good one I’m guessin from the sounds he was putting out], and his “glitch-tronica” actually felt much more humanistic live than it does in his records.
[…] main act was, fortunately or un-, very very similar to the last time, except even louder. The South Paw felt a lot like a larger version of the Cat’s Cradle in […]
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[…] on the drumset here (combining in equal parts the flamboyant dramatisms of Brian Viglione and the ridiculous expressions of the drummer from the Icy Demons). Buscemi, for his part, was a more than able pianist, hammering out jaunty vaudeville-style tunes […]
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