Spin Party
Reviewed by Michael Bertin, Fri., March 18, 2011
Spin Party
Stubb's, Friday, March 18Yep, that really was OMD. Or at least a scaled-down version with Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries. If you were unsure, all you had to do was look around the crowd and see both the average age and the percentage of X chromosomes shoot up appreciably. It was also surprisingly fun, beyond the obligatory performance of "If You Leave," and not in a sad, wistful Pretty in Pink way. That's probably a valid assessment even before Moby came out to play bass for a couple of tracks. Many of the other nonheadliner performances were uneven. You'd be hard-pressed to write more innocuous and forgettable post-Americana than the Smith Westerns. On the other end of the pendulum were England's the Vaccines. A) Rock. B) The guitar player could pass as Mike Reno's kid (Google it). If you really dig, you can find hints of Nuggets-like Standells buried in what comes out as a less New Wave-y version of the Killers. As for headliners TV on the Radio, scorching (and fucking loud) live versions of tracks like "Young Liars" and "Staring at the Sun" continue to cement the Brooklynites as one of the most dynamic young(ish) American rock bands. It'd be a travesty if they were a nostalgic novelty in 25 years.
