LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC

Listening to the Maine Coons is like never getting fully dressed in the morning, marching down to McCarren Park to meet some friends, getting well-oiled on Tecates in 65 degree weather, calling it a day, crashing in a San Loco to eat a burrito the size of two hamsters, and stealing a garden ornament on the way home.

The Maine Coons are the one man band of lead singer anonymous, and they have been very busy this weekend. In the last two days they’ve trailblazed Williamsburg and Greenpoint, playing Glasslands, Joe’s Fresh Pad, and Coco 66.

The Coons sound like a philandering cousin to local favorites The Beets. The Coons’ songs with shouted vocals and tom and snare drums chronicle lazy playboyism and being a causeless, incorrigible musician. For instance, “My Kind of Luv” sounds like an early Starlight Mints song, replete with xylophone, whistling and melodic cadences. “Ghetto Queen” plays like the park bench observations of the fairer sex belted out above overdriven guitars.

The Maine Coons sound very Williamsburg-now, drenched in reverb and sing-songyness. You’re likely to see them alongside the Beach bands of the moment. Maybe you’ll even see them in a San Loco.

By Thomas Wilk

THIS WEEK IN SHOWS

WEDS, DEC. 2

Jaguar Love, The King Left, Yes Giantess, Violent Soho
Mercury Lounge
8:00 PM, $10 adv/$12 do, 21+
People have said that Johnny Whitney of Jaguar Love sounds like “Robert Plant on steroids.” I was gonna say he sort of reminds me of Jay Reatard in a higher register. Either way, we’re talking shrieky, jolting energy. These guys make some catchy, noisy, uptempo pop with y’know, canned beats. Enjoy!

Werewolves, Strange Rivals, Heliotropes
Glasslands
8:00, $5, 21+
Never underestimate the power of the keys to take something dramatic and make it cinematic. I’m using the term “cinematic” very liberally to mean that you might find yourself playing out long scenes in your head while listening to Werewolves. Or maybe it’s their sneering vocals that do it, I don’t know yet. What I do know is that they’re dynamic performers and they’re playing Glasslands this Wedsnesday…

SAT, DEC. 5

Bowerbirds
Union Pool
8:00, $10, 21+
Did you know that the male bowerbird hops around with a flower in his beak in an attempt to woo a mate? How sweet! On the other hand, the male angler fish sniffs out the female, bites her, releases an enzyme that fuses the two at the blood-vessel level, and then atrophies until he is no more than a pair of parasitic gonads. The world is ugly, but if you want to linger on the more poignant aspects of life, why not get all acoustic and snuggly with Bowerbirds for the night? They’re also playing Bowery Ballroom with Elvis Perkins on Thursday, but I like to promote the more intimate, boozier, cheaper shows…

Or you can just head towards Kent Ave. and then decide…
More on This Week In Shows

FRESH BAKED
in NYC
The Beets
Spit In the Face of People Who Don’t Want to Be Cool
2009 | Captured Tracks
B-

Listening to The Beets’ debut album, my initial crotchety-old-man reaction is, “Who wants to sound like that?”

Drenched in reverb, the 12 songs on Spit In The Face of People Who Don’t Want to Be Cool can be lazily referred to as garage rock, but they are actually more reminiscent both of The Velvet Underground’s first couple of albums and of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound recordings – that is, if Spector allowed his let-all-the-instruments-bleed-together approach apply to the vocals too.

I’m frankly baffled by this choice to bury the vocals and make it all sound like a murmuring radio on the opposite side of the room. After all, if you can spare enough dough to have someone put your album out on vinyl, why can’t you spare a little bit more to have someone mix the recordings so they don’t sound like they were made with a tape player stuck in a burlap sack?

Granted, that was my initial reaction. I’ve listened to the album about 4 or 5 times now (it clocks in at less than a half-hour, so that’s not hard to do), and the songs themselves are memorable enough to make me respect The Beets as a band. Heck, I’ll probably keep this album in regular listening rotation.
More on The Beets | Spit In the Face of People Who Don’t Want to Be Cool

THIS WEEK IN SHOWS

WEDS. OCT 7

Golden City, The Fear and the Trembling, The Twees, Lyrycyst
Public Assembly
8:00 PM, $10, 21+
On Wednesday, embrace your hedonism while simultaneously easing your conscience. All proceeds of this GIMMESOUND.COM GiveBack Live Music Series go to The Food Bank For New York City. The bands are really good too! So if you’re on the fence about going to a mid-week show, remember that you can be doing some good just by rocking out.

THURS, OCT. 8

Vandelles, Sleigh Bells, Telltale, Young Boys
Public Assembly
9:00 PM, $8, 21+
Dude! It’s the JezebelMusic.com Feature Show! Honestly, I would list this no matter what, but I’m really excited about this show. We’ve got The Vandelles with their noisy surf – “fifties spy music,” is how their drummer Suzanne explains it; Sleigh Bells with their fun, repetitive beats that go straight to your backbone, Young Boys’ pop songs cloaked in feedback and leather jackets, and floating, dark shoegaze from Telltale. It’ll be an interesting mix of bands who aren’t so easy to define. (Though I just tried to.) You can find us editors shaking it in the front row.
More on This Week In Shows

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC

photo by Aubrey Stallard

The Beets are a Jackson Heights-based band currently pumping out some of the most charming and loveable 60s-inspired garage rock we’ve heard in a while. Their new 12 song 12” LP, The Beets Spit in the Face of People Who Don’t Want to Be Cool was hot off the vinyl press in March. And now they’ve packed up their hand-drawn banners and are touring the Ole U.S. of A. with Vivian Girls and Air Waves. JezebelMusic.com’s Tricia Patterson spoke with bassist/vocalist Jose Garcia about the New York scene, touring and Nickelodeon.

JM.com: So your name, “The Beets,” any relation to that fictional band from the Nickelodeon cartoon “Doug”?

Jose Garcia: Absolutely not. Juan named the band The Beets cause he was in his kitchen and saw a can of beets. Juan is from Uruguay, so I don’t think he watched Nickelodeon. None of us had cable, so we never watched.

JM.com: How did the band form?

Jose: I met Juan at LaGuardia Community College about five years ago in art class. We formed two bands, but they didn’t really go anywhere. Then we decided to try again and it was called The Beets. It was just me and him. We didn’t have a drummer, but then we met Jacob at a show, and we asked if he wanted to play with us. We’ve been playing together for a year and that’s the history of the Beets.

JM.com: I saw on one of your stage banners you said “We are the Beets and we are from Jackson Heights”. It seems like you have a lot of New York pride.

Jose: Yeah definitely. I think anyone should be proud of where they’re from. Once we started playing the Brooklyn music scene especially, we just wanted to let everyone know that we’re representing Queens. I grew up in Jackson Heights. And its Juan’s and Jacob’s home away from home.
More on Jose Garcia, The Beets

LIVE JOURNAL
JezebelMusic.com @ Death By Audio
August 25, 2009 | Vivian Girls, The Beets, Real Estate, Best Fwends

photo by Thomas Wilk

Every night at eight pm, as the sun melts into New Jersey, bodies rise out of the sunflower patches and ashen alleys of Williamsburg’s South Second Street and saunter up to Death By Audio. Inside, Todd P is playing mash-ups that sound like April March on Adderall at a Bollywood circus. A girl with a wandering eye is talking about living in the ghetto and a woman near me is wearing her new “Eraserhead” tank top for the first time. I am drinking Efes, a Turkish beer available in Kensington for $.99 that gets its signature taste from the rice that is added to its brew. According to Efes Beverage group, Efes has a “tangy malt and hops aroma, rich malt in the mouth, and a bitter-sweet finish that becomes dry and hoppy,” precisely the tangy and dry feeling that night in Death By Audio.

After riding my bike through the dogged heat to the show, there was a new ecosystem growing down my neck, shoulders and back, and I sure was ready for some music to begin. Austin, Texas’ identically dressed Best Fwends opened the show with crowd-bombing jump kicks as they spazzed to their iPod, playing descending guitar chugs and fast beats. The vocals of this pair could be borrowed for a cartoon about evil motorcycle rats, who often take breaks from loitering in front of truck stops to belt out a Robert Palmer song.
More on Vivian Girls, The Beets, Real Estate, Best Fwends @ Death By Audio | 8.25.09

LIVE JOURNAL
JezebelMusic.com @ Glasslands Gallery
July 2, 2009 | Golden Triangle

photo by Rebecca Gaffney

I got to Glasslands right as The Beets’ set ended, and hung out with the sweet, massive, overworked bouncer as like 200 hundred sweaty peeps poured outta the door, one after the other; a bright-eyed cacophony of faces and skinny limbs, meeting a stream of maybe 100 kids trying to go the other way, in.

“At capacity, no one else can enter!” the bouncer yelled, though after a while he let me in when I told him I was gonna cover the show. Feeling like I’d won the golden(!) ticket, I made my way up to the left-hand corner of the stage and proceeded to inadvertently get in the band’s way, like twelve times, as they set up. I don’t think they gave a crap. The whole vibe there was kind of in the way, in yer face, off-the-hook, in the most gentle way possible. It was challenging and lulling at the same time – exactly  what you would want from a night out. They had a garage-rock DJ and there were weird, rad, brightly-colored vids playing – they  looked like benevolent skulls, fiery snakes, washed-out rainbows. But who the hell knows, it was hard to see through the steamy, sexy heat. The night was a trademark Toubinesque (as in Jonathan Toubin, New York Night Train founder) wild, happy party. The whole crowd seemed high on the hot, steamy, slightly oxygen-deprived setting. I was ready for a good inaugural view of Golden Triangle, who I’d scandalously missed for years.

Golden Triangle started up pretty quickly – exploded would be a better way to describe it. It felt like a fireball made up of three parts exuberant female, three parts art dude, crazy energy, crazy fun, with guitarist OJ holding it down and grounding the whole thing. I got obsessed with trying to capture stills of them, getting their crazy hooha, holding so still with my camera’s shutter open for like 20 seconds: a study in opposites. Every now and then I took a break to freak out with the boisterous audience. Every now and then lead singer Vashti’s vocals would break through with an endorphin-releasing post-Siouxsie clarity that made you just go, “ahhh.” It felt like they swept the audience up in their wild tornado, glamored us, and sent us back out, panting and happy, a half hour later. So, fuck yeah, go see Golden Triangle bring on the awesome.

by Rebecca Gaffney

SEE IT LIVE
JezebelMusic.com @ Bruar Falls
July 3, 2009 | Grooms, The Beets, Air Waves, Real Estate

[All images copyright 2009 Rachel Oakes]

Real Estate

More on Grooms, The Beets, Air Waves, Real Estate @ Bruar Falls 7.3.09