aeeditor@gmail.com

 

TV on the Radio Cured My Hangover!

Live @ The Plaza, May 6

Luke Simcoe, OP Contributor

 

Due to the shooting that occurred at Richard’s the night
before, the concert was hastily moved to The Plaza and
billed as an early show so that the club could still sling
booze to the collar-popped masses later that evening.
Neither the venue change, nor the curfew could stop
Celebration, the show’s openers, from delivering a set of
fractured but danceable art-rock. Hailing from Baltimore,
the band is fronted by petite dynamo Katrina Ford, who
shook her booty all over the stage while singing and panti-
ng in a wavering voice that channeled equal parts Karen O
and Patti Smith. The band is friends with TVOTR (Ford
did backing vocals for a few tracks on Desperate Youth,
Bloodthirsty Babes) and throughout Celebration’s set, mem-
bers of the headlining band came and went, lending their
respective talents to various songs (a favour which
Celebration would later return). This created a friendly and

communal vibe that persisted throughout the night and
had everyone in the audience smiling |

TVOTR took the stage right after and proceeded to
blow the sold-out crowd’s collective mind over the course
of their set, which opened with a frenetic version of “The
Wrong Way.” It was the band’s last show before the
European leg of their tour, and they lived up to frontman
Tunde Adebimpe’s promise that we were “in for something
special.” Live, TVOTR is possessed of an energy that their
studio albums only hint at.

Adebimpe threw his whole body into his songs, rolled
his eyes back into his head and projected his voice with a
fervor generally reserved for hyperbolic gospel choirs.
Scarf-toting Guitarist/vocalist Kyp Malone harmonized
perfectly with Adebimpe and multi-instrumentalist/pro-
ducer David Andrew Sitek was a ball of energy onstage,

singing along to every song despite his lack of a micro-
phone.

The band’s forthcoming LP, Return ta Cookie Mountain,
leaked out onto the net over a month ago, and it was cool
to hear some “new” material that everyone—not just that
one crazy, Internet-savvy fan at the front—could sing
along to. A rousing rendition of “Playhouses,” Cookie
Mountain's opener, featured an appearance from
Celebration’s Ford and set the crowd on fire with its cho-
rus of “My heart’s aflame/My body’s strained/But God I
like it!” The rest of the setlist was a great mix of old and
new, with the band delivering both “Young Liars” and
“Satellite” from their debut EP, the latter featured
Adebimpe howling through a megaphone.

TVOTR is a band obsessed with creativity (both
Adebimpe and Sitek are visual artists), and their refusal to
simply replicate their songs in a live context really elevated
the show. Songs like “Dreams” and “The Wrong Way”
came to life when infused with Adebimpe’s stage presence
and the band’s energetic dynamic. The two songs are
arguably the strongest on Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes,
and performed live they were even more evocative than
their studio incarnations.

I arrived at the show with a severe hangover courtesy
of The OP’s annual general meeting, but my headache and
nausea were gone by the time TVOTR had torn into their
third number. It was as if Adebimpe and company took
time off from leading their aforementioned choir and
healed me with a smack to the head and a breath of fresh
aural air. ’m not a religious man, but I’m happy to sing the
praises of T'V on the Radio. Can I get an Amen?

 

They interview Horses Don't They?
A conversation with Nut Brown of They Shoot Horses Don't They

Chelsea Mushaluk, OP Contributor

Vancouver has a wicked music scene, we all know that.
And the seemingly never-ending and always-growing list of
bands from the area has been getting a lot of attention
lately, in Canada and elsewhere. This is due to bands like
indie-pop favourites The New Pornographers, psych-tock-
ers and Coldplay tour mates, Black Mountain, and more
recently, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

They Shoot Horses are the latest purveyors of noisy,
fun, and sometimes just plain weird pop music. And they’re
local, too! They recently signed with esteemed indie label
Kill Rock Stars and their latest record, Boo Hoo Hoo Boo, is
receiving all kinds of press. Fresh off of a tour through
the West coast of the US, including the consistently awe-
some South By Southwest Festival in Austin Texas, the
band is now back in Vancouver and I had the opportunity
to speak with Nut Brown, a.k.a. Josh, about all things
Horses.

As we sat during the tail end of what seemed to be a
very exciting hockey game in a little cafe, Nut Brown out-
lined what exactly it is that he does. “I’m trying to be the
singer of a band, and I play guitar. A lot of screaming, that
kind of singing,” he explained. “It takes somebody to sing
in a band, and that’s me.”

For anyone who has seen the Horses live, it’s definitely

an experience. There are horns, people yelling, things
clanging, jumping...the whole shebang. And is it planned?
Well, kind of. “We have plans, but they don’t always work
out. That’s what interests us the most. What doesn’t work
is the most interesting part. If you say, ‘We’re not going to
plan anything, then that’s kind of a plan.”

Perhaps one of the neatest plans, from an audience
standpoint, is South By Southwest. Over 1300 artists,
Wayne Coyne in a plastic bubble walking down the
street—I can only imagine the awesomeness. However,
Brown showed me a slightly different side of the tour that
culminated in their SxSW appearance. “It was, well, again
we made lots of plans and some of them worked out and
some of them didn’t. It was good, the whole experience, it
was lots of desperation and glory, you know? A little bit of
the bottom and a little bit of the top.”

Proverbs aside, there had to have been something awe-
some about Austin. Brown reassured me that there was:
“Austin was really good. There’s lots of music down there,
lots of bands, they gave us wristbands to see any band.”
And with that, my admiration of SxSW was reaffirmed.

The tour was not without adversity, however, with
Shane Krause leaving the band shortly after their return to
Vancouver. “It’s just one of those things where touring is a

tough thing to do. You're on the road, and driving a lot,
and a band is kind of a special, magic thing that you want
to be a good thing to be doing,” Brown explained. “And
there’s going to be tensions, but when touring’s hard
enough, and then there’s that extra little thing, it’s just a
personality thing. You know, we have to tour a lot, and we
want to be as good as possible, and as an experience.”

Though they have no immediate plans for another
record, they do plan to tour again in the near future.
Hopefully, this plan will work out. Despite the adversity
and a little bit of being on the bottom, the Horses have
managed to keep themselves out of the glue factory and
come out on top.