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.”