Best Return to the Bowery Ballroom

Friday night I went to see the Rapture at the Bowery Ballroom. I hadn't been to the Bowery for months and months. It was the Rapture's first show anywhere for a long time (not counting a few little recent sets at Crash Mansion and the Tribeca Grand) and they had lots of new material to debut.

Ugh. Another "Doors Open at 9 PM" concert. Don't they know I'm too eager to start my nights to show up places after 10 on a Fridays?



Mahi Mahi was the first opening band of the night. They're the kind of band that is sufficiently fun live, but probably really boring to listen to on a record.



They were like Death from Above 1979 minus the guitar plus a keyboard plus a whole lot of vocoder (all of a sudden does it sound like I'm describing the best band in the world? Trust me, they weren't as good as the band as I seem to be describing)



The second opening band was Cut Copy, whom I had seen a few nights before with Franz Ferdinand. I was pretty excited to see them again, and up close.



I've heard Cut Copy described as like the dance-punk version of Daft Punk, so it was funny to me that they used actual Daft Punk songs as backing tracks for a few numbers.



I don't have enough to say about them to go with each photo.









Merlin Bronques was there, of course, avoiding taking pictures of me, of course.



Check it out, Cut Copy is from Australia, but they play on Chevy mats.



When the Rapture set up they placed a brand new guitar at the front of the stage . . . the tags were still on it and everything. I found this to be odd, like when kids leave the tags on their shoes or hats.



I'll be honest. I didn't really care for the the Rapture's new stuff. Mostly because I hadn't heard it before, but also because the songs had rapping and VanHalen-style fret-tapping. I kept thinking "Man, just play one of your old songs!" But when they played an old song, I always thought "Man, didn't you just play this song?"









Wait a second . . . don't the two main Rapture guys look like Simon and Garfunkle, I mean, just a little bit?



You'll see here that Mr. Rapture-Guitarist's guitar has tags hanging off of it, meaning he broke a string on his first guitar and switched right away to his brand-new guitar.



I think the audience's secret was that as much as we like any old Rapture song (any old Raptures song, I said) we were all mostly hanging in there to hear "House of Jealous Lovers" and when the song finally hit . . .



People went crazy. (Maybe shake your computer monitor around a bit to better simulate a crowd going crazy?)