Category: Music

Let me shoot straight with you. Boom Bip sucks. After hear­ing them play, I was­n’t sur­prised that I’d nev­er heard of them and I ful­ly expect to nev­er hear from them again. In fact, that’d bet­ter hap­pen. Boom Bip [stu­pid name] is one dude, appar­ent­ly, and if you took all the band mem­bers and squashed them togeth­er, you might have one dude who could play one instru­ment. The drum­mer beat the same damn rhythm on the high-hat and snare for their set, the bassist played the same two notes on the top two strings on his bass, the lead gui­tarist played the same chord on the bot­tom two strings of his gui­tar the whole time and, by far the worst, was the key­boardist, who had a mobile com­mand cen­ter of gad­getry and lap­top­pery, but seemed to only play a mid­dle C in every song. Beat-inten­sive instru­men­tal noise-rock is bor­ing. Unless you are Ratatat, lyrics are good, moth­er­fuck­ers. I’ve had more fun with cafe­te­ria food than watch­ing Boom Bip. I do not rec­om­mend them.

Inter­pol could have had the worst show of their careers last night, and no one would have noticed, not after Boom Bip [I mean, seri­ous­ly, you can’t come up with a bet­ter name than that?]. Full dis­clo­sure: I did­n’t like Antics at all, and still love Turn on the Bright Lights. Inter­pol in con­cert was what I had expect­ed Inter­pol in con­cert to be like. My friend Phil said that he’d heard they are great live, and if you like your live bands to sound just like they do on their albums, Inter­pol is great live. They set down sol­id lay­ers in their rhythm sec­tion and the vocals are fraught enough to over­come any redun­dan­cy in the sound [Boom Bip, take note!]. So, Inter­pol plays like a well-oiled machine. And there­in might be my prob­lem with them. When I hear a band live I like crowd inter­ac­tion and a lit­tle bit of improv, the lyrics sung a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent­ly, a gui­tar solo now and then; with Inter­pol it is almost mechan­i­cal, they are just com­ing out and doing their job, they keep them­selves too tight­ly reined in for me.

I had a pret­ty decent time, they played my favorite song of theirs, Spe­cial­ist, and my third favorite song, Roland, dur­ing their encore, but did­n’t play my sec­ond favorite, Obsta­cle 2. They, expect­ed­ly, played a bunch of songs from Antics, but I like their ear­li­er stuff, which does­n’t bode well for a band with only two albums under its belt. The Ago­ra is pret­ty sweet though. This para­graph has three sen­tences and too many com­mas.

Here ends this elit­ist music review, but I had no need to say it twice.