Having a severe case of déjà vu, I ended up at Spaceland again on Wednesday night for Club NME and a spectacular line up of The Annuals, Jim Noir, and Tralala.
I was most interested in seeing Jim Noir as he was featured in one of my favorite magazines, Future Music. The magazine did a good write up describing his Beach Boys influenced Britpop and explaining his love of synths. My interest was also piqued by some of the press I was reading about the Annuals who hail from Raleigh, North Carolina. The Annuals came up first and Spaceland was surprisingly packed early on. I guess the word is out because The Annuals played an incendiary set. An amalgamation of Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, with a dash of jazzy guitar riffs, odd instrumentation, lush harmonies, and gobs of volume. Kenny Florence who plays guitar carries this band with their shifting time changes and excellent use of pedals. He had a Electro Harmonix Holy Grail reverb, Boss Delay,Phaser, Tremolo, and Pitch Shifter in his arsenal. Another interesting fact about the band is no one is over the age of 22..yikes!!! They have a ton of talent for being that young and were extremely tight as a band. Rolling Stone and Spin have gushing reviews about their album Be He Me which I purchased at the show. They will be one of the bands to watch in 2007.
Jim Noir came up next and though not as loud as the Annuals, he was very entertaining. I heard at his show the night before that he missed a verse in one of his songs due to the jetlag from his flight from England. His stage presence was very dapper for being billed as Jim Noir which was ironic. He proceeded to play a tight set of polished ’60s style pop songs with flakes of electronica eminating from his laptop. I recommend checking out his cd Tower of Love. If you go to the Barsuk records website you can get it with 2 extra tracks as well. The crowd seemed even more excited to see Jim Noir because he received a rapturous appaluse that forced a rare encore for an opening band at Spaceland. It included some video of the toe tapping “Tell Me What to Do”.
Tralala are a band by the way of Brooklyn. They have a 3 female singer fronted band that sounds similar to the Donnas, The Runaways, with a more pop-punk type vibe. The crowd had slowly diminished thru the night and I stayed for a few songs as I needed to go home and pack for Vegas and the Australian power trio of Wolfmother and some other band called Silversun Pickups.
