On Annuals and Pilot Speed
Mar. 1st, 2007 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beautifulduckweedI dragged Schwern and Jessica to see Annuals and Pilot Speed at the Doug Fir Lounge last night. Jessica didn't actually mean to attend at first, but she was, as she put it, swept along in a Candy-sized hurricane. Which is a fairly pleasant sort of hurricane to be caught in, as far as it goes, because instead of wrecking your house and tearing up trees, I make big messes in your kitchen and then drag you to see skinny boys with floppy hair whale away at their guitars on-stage.
ANYWAY, the show was excellent. I was highly, highly impressed by Pilot Speed, whom I'd never heard of prior to last night. They combined The Bends-era Radiohead pop sensibilities with Interpol's reverberating intensity, and the sound was big, full and gorgeous. I was so impressed, in fact, that I toddled over to the merchandise counter and bought their new album. More on that later.
And then Annuals came on. The first thing that struck me was how young they look. Nobody in the band is older than 22, according to the band biography page on their website. I wanted to hug all of them and bake 'em cookies.
Then they started playing. HOLY SHIT. I haven't encountered energy and intensity of that magnitude in a long, long time--perhaps since my last Femi Kuti show. It wasn't the most polished show I'd ever seen, and it wasn't the most technically accomplished, but it was one of the most fun, and I grinned like a mad woman through most of it. They bounced, they sang, they shouted, they even occasionally flailed around--in short, they rocked the fuck out, and they did it hard. Annuals seem to subscribe to two music performance philosophies:
1. Rock really, really hard.
2. HOLY SHIT GUYS DRUMS ARE AWESOME, so let's have two different drum sets on-stage and let everyone in the band who wants to smack on drums have a go at assorted points during the show.
I'm not kidding about the second point. During one of the songs last night, four of the six members were whacking away at the two drum sets and two separate free-standing toms. The lead singer has his own tom that he lugs around and bangs away on during several songs--he smacked it so hard on one of the songs that one of the drumsticks flew out of his hand, as a matter of fact. As a fan of big, full percussion sounds, I highly approved of this set-up.
And when the audience didn't leave after their last song, the slightly nonplussed singer and lead guitarist (they weren't expecting an encore and had unplugged most of the equipment) came back on-stage to perform an impromptu song about seagulls.
Overall, the show was an outstanding value for $8. If you have a chance to catch them, you should. If I had to describe what they sound like, I'd say they combine the lush arrangements of Broken Social Scene and the emotional intensity of Arcade Fire, except the lead singer doesn't sound nearly as as annoying as dude from Arcade Fire.
So then I went home and listened to the Pilot Speed CD I'd bought, Into the West. And...if it weren't for the fact that I recognized some of the songs I'd heard live, I wouldn't have been able to tell they were the same band. The CD sounds slick, over-produced and muted; the intensity, the atmospheric reverb and big, full, crunchy guitar I enjoyed so much at the live show were completely missing. That's not to say that I don't like slick and pretty--Sufjan Stevens is a good example of slick and pretty done right--but all the interesting edges to Pilot Speed had been smoothed away, and the CD ended up sounding like a cut-rate version of Keane. They need to find whoever mixed and engineered Interpol's releases and get those guys to work on their albums. The songs are decent, but the way they've been mixed has rendered them completely toothless. It was also an interesting lesson in how important arrangement and engineering are to my ears, not just composition.
In conclusion: I'll see Pilot Speed live again in a heartbeat, but I'm not sure I'm buying another album of theirs.
And Annuals rock all around. They're going places. They deserve to.
ANYWAY, the show was excellent. I was highly, highly impressed by Pilot Speed, whom I'd never heard of prior to last night. They combined The Bends-era Radiohead pop sensibilities with Interpol's reverberating intensity, and the sound was big, full and gorgeous. I was so impressed, in fact, that I toddled over to the merchandise counter and bought their new album. More on that later.
And then Annuals came on. The first thing that struck me was how young they look. Nobody in the band is older than 22, according to the band biography page on their website. I wanted to hug all of them and bake 'em cookies.
Then they started playing. HOLY SHIT. I haven't encountered energy and intensity of that magnitude in a long, long time--perhaps since my last Femi Kuti show. It wasn't the most polished show I'd ever seen, and it wasn't the most technically accomplished, but it was one of the most fun, and I grinned like a mad woman through most of it. They bounced, they sang, they shouted, they even occasionally flailed around--in short, they rocked the fuck out, and they did it hard. Annuals seem to subscribe to two music performance philosophies:
1. Rock really, really hard.
2. HOLY SHIT GUYS DRUMS ARE AWESOME, so let's have two different drum sets on-stage and let everyone in the band who wants to smack on drums have a go at assorted points during the show.
I'm not kidding about the second point. During one of the songs last night, four of the six members were whacking away at the two drum sets and two separate free-standing toms. The lead singer has his own tom that he lugs around and bangs away on during several songs--he smacked it so hard on one of the songs that one of the drumsticks flew out of his hand, as a matter of fact. As a fan of big, full percussion sounds, I highly approved of this set-up.
And when the audience didn't leave after their last song, the slightly nonplussed singer and lead guitarist (they weren't expecting an encore and had unplugged most of the equipment) came back on-stage to perform an impromptu song about seagulls.
Overall, the show was an outstanding value for $8. If you have a chance to catch them, you should. If I had to describe what they sound like, I'd say they combine the lush arrangements of Broken Social Scene and the emotional intensity of Arcade Fire, except the lead singer doesn't sound nearly as as annoying as dude from Arcade Fire.
So then I went home and listened to the Pilot Speed CD I'd bought, Into the West. And...if it weren't for the fact that I recognized some of the songs I'd heard live, I wouldn't have been able to tell they were the same band. The CD sounds slick, over-produced and muted; the intensity, the atmospheric reverb and big, full, crunchy guitar I enjoyed so much at the live show were completely missing. That's not to say that I don't like slick and pretty--Sufjan Stevens is a good example of slick and pretty done right--but all the interesting edges to Pilot Speed had been smoothed away, and the CD ended up sounding like a cut-rate version of Keane. They need to find whoever mixed and engineered Interpol's releases and get those guys to work on their albums. The songs are decent, but the way they've been mixed has rendered them completely toothless. It was also an interesting lesson in how important arrangement and engineering are to my ears, not just composition.
In conclusion: I'll see Pilot Speed live again in a heartbeat, but I'm not sure I'm buying another album of theirs.
And Annuals rock all around. They're going places. They deserve to.
