Junior Boys, Max Tundra, The Sleeps

Junior Boys kicked off their Amer­i­can tour the oth­er night at The Grog Shop in Cleve­land Heights. This is the sec­ond time I’ve seen them and they put on a great show. That night was offi­cial­ly the first time that any­one in the States had a chance to buy their new album Begone Dull Care, since it has­n’t been released yet. Of course it has been leaked on the Inter­net, and Jere­my Greenspan joked about that fact while encour­ag­ing us to go buy the CD. He also talked about how much he likes Cleve­land and recount­ed his first time vis­it­ing, when he was 12 or so, on a ‘Jew Camp’ field trip. He thought he was going to go to an exot­ic place like the Moth­er­land, New Jer­sey or Flori­da. Basi­cal­ly the dude was hilar­i­ous.

I took some video of a cou­ple of their new songs. Here’s Hazel from Begone Dull Care:

Here’s Work from the same album:

Here’s a song off of So This is Good­bye called Dou­ble Shad­ow:

The night start­ed off with the local band The Sleeps. They were pret­ty good, and had an inter­est­ing stage pres­ence using lots of black­light. They were hand­ing out tons of free copies of their demo. I think they were a bit off that night, as the songs weren’t as tight as they sound on the demo. Here’s a video of their song No More:

Max Tun­dra was the mid­dle band, but the dude did­n’t do much for me. One cool song was when he asked us if we remem­bered old rave music (I’m assum­ing most of the young crowd did­n’t) and then dropped an old school boodoop-badoop-boodoop-badoop-bop-boop beat down and impro­vised on top of it using weird hand­held instru­ments. It was the slight­est bit Clin­i­cal, if you get my drift. Must be some­thing in the water over in Britain.

One very strange thing about this show was the fact that all of the bands and a vast major­i­ty of the crowd was made up of short to very short dudes. It was almost as if there was one of those signs that said “You have to be under this height to watch the show.”