Photo by josephinegbg

Last night’s Love Is All show at the Bowery Ballroom was great. LIA has a great, infectious energy. Nicholaus Sparding broke a guitar string during the first song. It created an unexpected pause between the first two songs, but I kind of love when bands are forced off of the script. Needless to say, Nicholaus broke another string about twenty minutes later which required him to borrow a guitar. If you have any doubt about the energy Love Is All plays with, count the broken guitar strings.

The band played a few songs from the impending album, A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night, which is rumored to be released in the fall. Everyone enjoyed the new songs, but the old songs coaxed people to dance.

Josephine Olausson is an impressive front woman. Last night, she looked a shorter, punkier Parker Posey on stage. She had this great, easy coolness as she worked the crowd. At one point, she even bent over to let some guy in the audience sing the chorus into her microphone. The best shows are always the ones where the band is having as much fun as the audience.

Love Is All covered “I Ran” by Flock of Seagulls which was pretty great live. You can hear a recorded version over at Electrorash.

If you haven’t heard Nine Times that Same Song, you’re missing out.

From Nine Times that Same Song:

“Ageing had Never Been His Friend”

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“Spinning and Scratching”

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Photo by Guy Eppel

We saw The Foals open for Band of Horses during CMJ at the Bowery Ballroom. Since then we’ve had on heavy rotation every song by The Foals that we downloaded off The Hype Machine. The band is described as dance-punk, kind of bordering on math rock — one of their songs is called “Mathletics.” We are not interested in debates about taxonomy here. The Foals sound a bit like Bloc Party (maybe it’s the English accents) and sort of like a beautiful alarm clock (if that’s possible).

The Foals only have four singles. Feast on this and you’ll be salivating for their impending album:

From Mathletics / Big Big Love Fig. 1:

“Big Big Love Fig.1″

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We were among the lucky few whom saw The New Pornographers last night play the second of two secret shows at the Bowery Ballroom. The NP gang seemed to be in pretty good spirits with lots of banter in between songs (especially AC — congrats). Well, except for Neko. The Bowery Ballroom sound crew struggled repeatedly to fix Neko Case’s ear monitor. Neko, you might have felt a little self-conscious, but we honestly can’t imagine why. You sang better than everyone in the room even without being able to hear the rest of the band. We love you.

Also we’d like to say how impressed we were by Kathryn Calder. Previously we’d had dismissed her as Knock-off Neko or, in our jealously, called her The Nepotistic Niece, but last night we were honestly impressed with her singing. Kat, the first time we saw you at the Brooklyn Bandshell almost two years ago, we resented you. We admit. We can be petty sometimes, but last night we could see how you had grown into a great performer.

Guys, despite the bitchy bloggers standing around us nay saying and critizing you for being just too damn good, but not good enough, we want to say we love you enthusiastically and we can’t wait to see you in October.

Now let’s talk about the raison d’etre for this post and yesterday.

We really love Challengers. We’ve had it for months and had a lot of time to listen to it. (Yes, we bought a copy of the album: you better do the same.) We think it’s great like we said before. We don’t care what Pitchfork says. Their review is only evidence of the growing irrelevance of Pitchfork. Pitchfork loves to build up their idols just to tear them down. The review isn’t even about the music. The review is about comparing The NPs to their collective past as a group and as individuals. The album is great. It has a lot of emotional movements that can’t be expressed with The NP energy turned up to 11. Rob, baby, you’re a 5.9 at best. Oh, and boring.

So we found this really cool discussion of Challenger on Matador’s website wherein AC Newman gives some interesting details about the album as a whole and each song.

From Challengers:

“Challengers”

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Oh yeah, Vampire Weekend opened for The NPs.

VW isn’t our style, but a lot of people really, really liked them. We were frankly surprised to see people singing along. We don’t assume we know everything about music, like some other music nerds (Rob). So, uh, good job Vampire Weekend.

From Vampire Weekend:

“Cap Cod Kwassa Kwassa”

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Finally, some jackass stole our camera. Our camera phone pictures are sad. Check out Gaelenh’s!

The New Pornographers are releasing their latest album, Challengers, next Tuesday August 21st. We are super excited. We’ve already ordered our copy of the album through the Buy Now, Get Now program.

Yesterday, the BNGN people sent out an email they were selling tickets to a secret show The New Pornographers were performing on Monday August 20th at the Bowery Ballroom. Unfortunately, we weren’t one of the lucky bastards to get tickets despite our best efforts to buy them. The link was down before we ever arrived at thenewpornographers.ducatking.com.

But today the BNGN people released 50 more tickets to the show. They said a technical meltdown delayed the email and we received it after all the tickets were sold. We didn’t get one of those 50 tickets either. But today’s email also included a link to tickets to a show on Tuesday at Ticketmaster. Jump on it. Tickets were still available the last time we looked.

It should be a great show — it’s the night their CD is released.

We’ve heard the album in its entirety. It’s a great album. It’s more mellow than their previous energetic work. So on a scale of 1 to 10 they’ve shifted from an 11 to like an 8. We love it. We can’t wait to see Neko Case and A. C. Newman and the rest of the gang.

From Challengers:

“My Rights Versus Yours”

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(download)

“Myriad Harbor”

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(download)

Tonight at the Bowery Ballroom we saw Ra Ra Riot and Tokyo Police Club.

We’ve seen Ra Ra Riot three times this year. The first time we saw them we were surprised and won over by the enthusiasm of the musicians in the band. We often feel that Ra Ra Riot’s best songs sound like six musicians accidentally playing in the same room. They seem to be lost in their own inner worlds until the music snaps together and creates this great sound that suddenly makes sense as a whole. We love them.

Tonight’s set was great. The passion and practice was apparent. The band played at least three songs that we haven’t heard before. We can’t wait to see them again in the future when these new songs are as strong as the rest.

Tokyo Police Club headlined the night. We discovered Tokyo Police Club listening to the KEXP Song of the Day podcast when we heard “Citzens of Tomorrow”. Maybe our understanding of the band’s themes were shaped too completely by this song, but we think most of their music sounds like the lost soundtrack of a great Philip K. Dick Sci-Fi flick about a dystopian future, i.e. very cool.

Whatever. They’re great. They had the crowd clapping along twice. We enjoyed the flying tambourines. We can’t wait to see more of Tokyo Police Club.

The show stopper was kick-ass. Both Ra Ra Riot and Tokyo Police Club crowded Bowery Ballroom’s stage to play a raucous cover of The Rentals‘ “Friends of P.” We wish we had a bootleg of the show made from the soundboard. If we find a copy of this song, we’ll post it.

From Tokyo Police Club’s A Lesson in Crime:

“Citizens of Tomorrow”

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“Nature of the Experiment”

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From Ra Ra Riot’s eponymous album:

“Each Year”

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From Ra Ra Riot’s myspace page:

“Anthony (Live)”

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UPDATE

Someone uploaded a video they took with (we guess) their camera of Tokyo Police Club and Ra Ra Riot playing “Friends of P” at the Bowery Ballroom.