Artists: Holy Fuck, Cornelius
Venue: Webster Hall, NYC, NY
Date: May 7, 2007
During my summer at Microsoft Research (working on this), I remember one Monday afternoon frantically listening to fragments of over 100 songs in about 15 minutes, trying to choose a song to bring into the summer’s first “play-and-tell.” Organized by a recent new-hire but populated entirely by summer interns, this was going to be a weekly event for people to share music with each other, hopefully introducing people to good music they hadn’t heard before, and perhaps also introducing people of similar tastes to each other. According to the email sent out by the organizer, we would have a mini-contest where people voted on the “best song” and “weirdest song,” and you get bonus points for artists that no one had heard of. Hence my quest for the perfect, and unknown, song. I finally narrowed it down to Blonde Redhead, Daedelus and Cornelius. Daedelus was first to go, since I hadn’t heard him enough to know the good songs yet. I struggled between Blonde Redhead and Cornelius a long time, but in the end I picked BR simply because their music was better, while Cornelius seemed more of an exploratory band charting the limits of music in a variety of directions without necessarily being worried about making good music. Unfortunately, many people had heard of BR there, and so I didn’t “win” (although I’m grateful for the winner’s choice of The Books‘ “Tokyo,” which introduced me to an awesome band that I’ve since seen two times). In retrospect, Daedelus would have been the best choice, although it might have been hard to pick a song that wouldn’t alienate a lot of people.
Anyways, having heard great things about Cornelius’s live show, I came to Webster Hall with the hope that they wouldn’t disappoint. Opening was Holy Fuck, who played almost a completely new show from last time, which had only been 6 months ago. Although to tell the truth, it was a very similar experience — their new album sounded a lot like their old one, albeit slightly more melodic.
Cornelius’s setup seemed promising: they had a giant white screen in front of them and they started with a lights and silhouettes show, blinking shadows of each band member in time with the music. Then the curtain went up and I somehow was not at all surprised by the group’s appearance — formal shirts and ties for all, and some awesome shades for the lead singer.
From then until almost the end of the night was just a blur. Playing almost all downtempo songs, I felt like I was playing Katamari Damacy on Ritalin — there were fascinating visuals behind them for the entire show, and the songs themselves varied a lot in style, although without any of the noise/experimental stuff I remembered from their albums. As the night went on, the band continued to play with little change in expression or audience participation level, leaving me wondering if I’d suddenly been transported to a Vegas bar at 4 a.m. where broken-down gamblers and inveterate drunks wasted away night after night.
Finally, just before the show ended, we were “treated” to some ear-splitting loud noise rock, and that was that. Although I don’t remember being bored at any point in the show, it was more of a “bleh” show than most — but admittedly inventive.
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