I need to get up to LA for shows more often. I tell myself this quite frequently but rarely feel like driving up from Long Beach for some reason. I added the Beach House/Papercuts show to my calendar quite a while ago and was excited to finally see Beach House in a non-festival setting. They were headlining two nights and the Fonda and it hadn’t crossed my mind that both nights might sell out. Luckily I was able to squeeze in and got there just as Papercuts took the stage.
My buddy Alex turned me onto Papercuts a while back when he said You Can Have What You Want was possibly his favorite album of the year. Sure enough I got hooked and have been keeping tabs on them since. They have a new album coming out on Subpop on March 1st and I highly recommend you head over to their site now to download the first two tracks from it… with a bonus song! – http://www.subpop.com/artists/papercuts. One of the free tracks is “Do You Really Wanna Know” probably my favorite of any of their songs. They saved it til the very end of their short set and I was happy to bop around in front of the sound board and think of the large group of people there getting turned onto a band they might not have heard yet. They’re a perfect opening band for Beach House too, moody yet poppy.
Jeremiah and I crossed paths with Amy and Natalie right after Papercuts and we introduced them to the wonderful Blue Palms brew house next door. We all had Blind Pig IPA during the set-break then slipped back into the packed house as Beach House took the stage. I’m not the biggest fan of the sound at the Fonda.. .err.. Music Box but I found a little nook behind the soundboard where it wasn’t crowded and it wasn’t too loud. Perfect. This was the first time since 2008 that Beach House had actually headlined a show in LA. They made the most of it by blasting through most of the tracks on Teen Dream and sprinkling in some old tracks and, i think, a new song or two. The crowd was very receptive and that seemed to feed lead-singer Victoria Legrand who was belting out one anthem after another. She even said that it was one of her favorite shows they’ve played…. which you hardly ever hear in LA. Some of the stand-out tracks of the night were “Zebra,” the star-light filled “Norway,” and I really dug the songs I wasn’t familiar with (I’ve listened to their second album Devotion a handful of times and didn’t recognize them from there). Let’s hope they’re sitting on a stock pile of quality tunes for a new album this year
Thanks to Donna and the Goldenvoice girls for the help. Thanks to Parm for the parking spots too.
