Cage the Elephant brought their tunes from albums Cage the Elephant and Thank You, Happy Birthday to Showbox SoDo on Friday night. Right after the band finishes up some major summer tour dates they hit the road with Foo Fighters. Pretty damn good. Photographer Matthew Lamb was at the Seattle show and offers up some great shots:
Photographer Simon Krane caught Architecture in Helsinki and Hooray For Earth at Neumos last Monday evening. I love these photos he got. Australians Architecture in Helsinki’s latest, Moment Bends is out now, while Hooray For Earth’s True Love just came out last week. Check out Hooray For Earth’s cool video for the title track here.
Architecture in Helsinki
Hooray For Earth
Naughty By Nature were the headliners at the Showbox Market on May 23rd. The hip hop trio is set to release their new album, Anthem Inc. this summer, but while you wait for it you can download a Naughty By Nature mixtape here. So far “Heavy in My Chevy” is my fave. Also please enjoy some super fine pix by Dave Lichterman of the band and Jay Barz from the Seattle show:
Agnes Obel played to a very warm audience last night at the Fremont Abbey, originally built as a Lutheran church in 1914. She is wrapping up a US tour in support of her new album, Philharmonics. I missed seeing her last March at SXSW, but was fortunate to catch her in Fremont before she heads back to Europe in a few weeks. Obel, born in Copenhagen, now living in Berlin, was accompanied by cellist Anne Muller, also of Berlin.
“Take me as I am, or not at all,” ends “Schumacher the Champagne,” the final track off The Wombats‘ latest CD, The Wombats Proudly Present . . . This Modern Glitch, and it might just be the band’s anthem. The Wombats happily wrapped Saturday night’s crowd at the Crocodile around their little fingers. Those same fingers of each band member managed to multitask on keys as well. You play guitar, bass or drums? That’s not enough. In The Wombats all band members play keys too, sometimes right at the same time they’re playing their “regular” instruments. The energy fed between the band [Matthew Murphy, Tord Øverland-Knudsen, and Dan Haggis (a fab drummer)] and audience was high – much higher than I see at usual shows. This audience was made up of fans who knew the songs, who knew the words, and became a huge part of the show themselves with their leaping around. The Wombats are an exciting band to watch because they have a vigorous dynamic among the band members. Bassist Tord Øverland-Knudsen must be one of my favorite bassists – watching him play bass while expending tons of energy (I’m using that word again, energy, and I don’t even think it was excess energy, just tons and tons of wonderful energy) was like a musical miracle. And the songs? Some of the best pop you’ll hear, such as “Techno Fan,” “Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves),” “Party in the Forest (Where’s Laura?),” “Schumacher the Champagne,” “Backfire at the Disco,” “Kill the Director,” (This is no Bridget Jones!) and “Let’s Dance to Joy Division.” “My First Wedding” reached a wicked momentum with the chanted lyrics, “she’s not that beautiful”. They all blew my mind, as did Murphy’s vocals, which captured all the atmosphere with perfect pitch.
The Wombats – all photos by Dagmar