@supercooleric — Another Fun Fun Fun Fest has come and gone. A wonderfully weird cocktail of nostalgia, hard rock, hip hop and indie pop fit for an iPod commercial, Fun Fun Fun Fest VI featured dust clouds, Ryan Gosling, bandanas, booty clapping and everything else you never knew you needed in a mid-sized music festival.

Below are some animated GIFs of a few of the acts I caught over the three-day weekend, including Active Child, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Purity Ring, MNDR, Austra, YACHT, Ty Segall, Passion Pit, The Joy Formidable, Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, Grimes, T Bird and the Breaks, Big Freedia and Black Milk. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Welcome to the first match-up of the 2009 Catchiest song of ’09 contest. I spent a few minutes looking for that CBS “do do do doo, do doo do dooo” update music, but to no avail.  We’ve got the juggernaut teen Queen Miley Cyrus, the overall #1 seed, against indie-rock’s 2009 break-out stars, Passion Pit. Both have been mashed up with Biggie,* but there’s little else in common with these two, besides maybe some synth. I’ve found myself in a terrible dance club singing Miley into a girl’s face more than I’d like to admit** and recently when someone asked for the link, I found myself watching the video twice in a row just for the hell of it. On the other hand I’ve also had three pulsing, sweaty dance parties at Passion Pit shows where I get lost in the trance of this infectious ditty and play it on repeat at 4 a.m. with big headphones at full blast like it’s my job.

I promised Andy I wouldn’t quote lyrics in a punny fashion if he would stop using the lazy, “Does this even need to get argued?” for every seemingly obvious match-up. We’ll get them out of our system on this first one and move into hard analysis from here on out. “And everything’s going to the beat…” Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Vampire Weekend is to 2008 as Passion Pit is to 2009. Indie-rock band featuring a high pitched singer, prominent keyboard and synth, barely drinking age. 

Like Vampire Weekend, they were almost dangerously hyped-up befpre their debut and somehow exceeded expectations getting above an 8 on Pitchfork and landing a Thursday night spot at Bonnaroo.  Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Sweaty dance parties. God love ‘em. The most fun you can have with your clothes on. Passion Pit’s dance parties are somewhere between Ghostland Observatory and Girl Talk on the intensity scale. The crowd’s are as packed (and dance harder) then a sold-out Ghostland shows , but it’s not nearly the sweaty free-for-all that Girl Talk is. I could have guessed that going in.

If you don’t know them yet, Passion Pit is a five-piece from Cambridge, Mass with a unique line-up: A drummer, bassist, two keyboardists and a synth/sounds man. What started as a Valentines Day present for Angelakos’ girlfriend two years ago has exploded into a critically acclaimed studio and live act on the heels of their first LP, Manners. The kind of band Pitchfork raves about and hipsters dance unabashedly to. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom So many lessons from this crash, I don’t know where to start. @ChrisinAustin and I arrived at Emo’s around 9:30, with the show called for 10. With all three outside doors well-guarded, we walked around to the alley, where Chris suggested scaling a wall or contorting our bodies underneath an impassably small hole in the fence.

Lesson #1 of the night: No grand entrances.

Every move you make in a crash should be explainable if you get caught. What’s your defense gonna be when you’re spotted lodged between two fences chained together behind Emo’s. Two fences chained loosely enough that you could have made it (if you hadn’t taken advantage of free root beer float night at Sonic.) Read the rest of this entry »