once more, with stage presence

Eye-opening experience last Thursday: The Like at Pianos. I walked in skeptical and left converted.

For a very long time I was ambivalent about The Like. It had been irritating me lately that they'd been garnering so much of what I falsely perceived as undeserved attention. In my very uninformed opinion, I had written them off as an "album band", the kind whose records are moderately listenable but whose live performances are punishing experiences that you would rather not subject yourself to enduring. I saw them in September last year, it was an unfortunate arrangement, for their company on the tour was Sahara Hotnights... and the stark contrast between the two bands' personalities only emphasized the tepid mediocrity of The Like's remarkably tepid and mediocre live performance. I was extremely put off by their collective persona: they were all rather demure, dressed like woodnymphs, and the drummer didn't wear shoes on stage. Characterized by a total lack of enthusiasm, they were received by an appropriately unenthusiastic audience, from whom they were able to elicit little more than a few smirks. Midway through the show, Z looked out into the audience and said meekly, "wow, thanks for coming out to see us... we really appreciate it," as if she expected her self-loathing charm to endear us to her. And it did, for a moment.... until she started singing again.
Sahara Hotnights (dynamic performers that they are) blew them off the stage.

And now, now this mediocre band that failed to impress me at all one year ago was being touted as prodigious new talent. And on Thursday I saw for myself that there was merit behind all the words of praise. Within the span of a year, they appear to have developed... character and stage presence, exhibiting a level of professionalism and overall maturity I never estimated they'd be capable of... I guess I underestimated them. Clearly the band has discovered musical refinement and Z has, to the gain of the world, discovered her lower register. So, the girl had the potential to be an outstanding vocalist after all.... who knew?

One year ago they were a cutesy, girly band. I regarded them as an underdeveloped, amateurish, premature effort at creating music. I decided it was just a lucky coincidence that they always translated well in recording. This year, they have evolved into a real band, with a singer who's no longer afraid to make optimal use of her killer contralto. (By god, they even learned to play their instruments with an acceptable amount of skill... most shockingly of all.) The newer tracks, a little more structurally sophisticated, are not "moderately listenable" but infectiously catchy. I guess being picked up by Geffen had something to do with their getting their act together, because somehow, their evolution doesn't seem organic. Either way, I applaud them. Never has a band from LA been so warmly embraced by the cut-throat NYC music scene, never has any band born of hollywood's "lightweight" indie pop scene been so beloved within the circles of New York's most self-important music nazis. I had this notion for so long that if they were ever to gain recognition outside of SoCal, the same fate -- that is, descension into shameful infamy -- that befell their friends and contemporaries (if not predecessors, by a couple years) Rooney, Maroon 5, and Phantom Planet would befall them. But it happens that their path to indie rock fame is less convoluted than I would have imagined, much more similar to the respectible route Rilo Kiley took (and unlike Rilo Kiley, they didn't have to deal with the awful stigma of association with saddle creek!), and despite having been ambivalent toward them for so long, I am surprisingly proud of them. They drew in a sizeable crowd; we had a handful of local scene celebrities walking among us that night: Vincent from Soft, all the Surefire boys, Sam from The Fine Lines, ALBERT HAMMOND JR, Franco from The Sexy Magazines, and one of the guys from Vietnam (don't ask me which one, they all look the same). I gawked shamelessly at Albert when he walked in. But so did everyone else.

It was just my good fortune that they shared a bill that night with Two If By Sea, a touring band from Baltimore. I saw them a while back for the first time at Sin-é, and if there was one band that night that I would most confidently have assumed were local to NYC, it would have been them. Their sound, their attitude, their overall appearance, everything about them suggested New York band. (With respect to similarities in musical sensibilities and a number of other factors, I associate them most closely with Interpol -- maybe that's why I think so?)

Individually, they struck me as Bedford avenue types, the kind you run into at parties where Miss Modernage is DJing, the kind you see biking across the bridge on fancy brakeless bianchis, the kind you avoid eye contact with on the L train by burying your face in some pretentious book that you aren't actually reading. They seemed so distinctively and quintessentially New York City that I pretty much convinced myself they looked familiar to me. (I almost asked the singer if he also played guitar in this band I saw earlier that week... no joke.) I took one look at the band and started wondering if I'd ever seen them around town before, run into one of them at Sound Fix, perhaps a Greenpoint rooftop party...

They played an all-around solid set this time but there was no one present save for a guy from The High Dials, me, and several other peculiar individuals who remained from earlier in the night. And they still played like it was nobody's business. Again.

They've got some good material. Indulge your curiosity:
Million To One
Mont Blank
Report From Damage Control