The Duke Spirit at Spaceland 6/12/07

If you ever buy tickets for Spaceland or The Echo online, you can sign up for a newsletter of upcoming events. Well, you can probably sign up without buying tickets, but that's how I came to receive this surprisingly useful e-mail. On Friday, I was fucking stoked to get the latest edition with the subject line: Echo/Spaceland must see: DIPLO, THE DUKE SPIRIT, BIG BUSINESS + more. All three of those acts sent me into a tizzy. That Friday night, I made it out to the Diplo show at the Echo, which was SICK!! Minus the fact that I kept elbowing people around me while dancing and pissed some other people off when I was trying to get my fat ass on stage to see Diplo spin up close...and personal.



Last night, if you had any taste at all, you would have blown off the novelty act that is the Pipettes at the Troubadour and gone to check out the gig that brought UK's the Duke Spirit out of the Joshua Tree desert, where they'd been recording their new album the last two months, and back to Spaceland. In fact, Liela Moss, their hot blonde minx lead singer, announced they had just finished recording their new record the previous night, which made the experience even cooler because the band seemed pretty jacked to play their new material. They opened with a new song and proceeded to pepper in new shit all night. On iTunes, the reviewer says they sound influenced by PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, and Velvet Underground, which is fine with me. I'd say they play straight forward rhythm and blues rock and roll. These guys do not fuck around. They're loud, abrasive, and lack pretentiousness. Moss is a great singer/front person whose earthly voice and furious tambourine
work mixes well with her band mates intense England brute look that at any given moment they'll put down their instruments to slam a pint and punch you in the face. A show stopper, just like at their gig here last year, was a track off their previous album, Cuts Across The Land, called Love is An Unfamiliar Name, which with its ooh-ooh chorus and guitar thumping crescendos, gives Moss and the rest of the band ample opportunity to melt your fucking face. And don't get the wrong idea when I say Moss is a hot blonde minx because chick can WAIL!!!!!





Fuck, last night was the SHIT!!!

They go back across the pond for a few weeks, but come back stateside on July 22 to play the O.C. Fair at the Pacific Ampitheatre in Costa Mesa, CA with Queens of The Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal. If you live in Southern California and missed last night's show, I suggest not fucking up this time and getting out to that show.

The Night by the Numbers:
Time Duke Spirit hit the stage: 11:02pm
Number of drinks between H-man, my friend Eddie, and I: 5
Rating of the Hottest Girl I saw: 8
Minimum charge on debit/credit card at Spaceland: $20
Number of songs I said "Holy Fuck" or "Holy Shit" after: 6

PHOTOGRAPHY BY H-MAN

Indie 103.1 Event at Montmarte Lounge 6/11/07

Last night, H-man got us on the list for an event thrown by local rock station Indie 103.1 that was apparently for winners of some sort of contest. The winners of this contest were treated to two sets of rock by would-be classic rockers the Shys and the Dior Homme ad looking The Cinematics. Oh, and $7 beers.

I had never been to the Montmarte Lounge, and, in fact, had never even heard of the place despite its location essentially two blocks away from H&D HQ. Located behind Hollywood Blvd. on the east side of Hollywood and Highland, the Montmarte Lounge seemed like an odd choice for an "indie" rock event in as much as that it's not dive-y but nice. Like really nice. And classy. In fact, with it's spacious, nouveau Hollywood vibe, it's the type of place you take your new-to-town chick on the third date to ensure some late night action. The stage was set up next to the bar and in front of what is assumedly the dance floor on nights that don't feature musical acts. It's an intimate venue and was probably cool to people who had entered a contest to see these bands. I did not fall into that camp. Nor did I really give a shit about these bands. But if I did, I would have been super stoked.


The crowd: a mixed bag.

Again, full of contest winners and not the typical L.A. promoter scumbag pool of wannabes/hanger-ons, so I won't hold it against the place that there were not that many cute girls. Some. I would say a little below the standard amount for any given event in H-wood. No L.A. tens that I saw. There was one girl that H-man was into who had an "athletic" (to quote him) body. But her face was beat and she had some bullshit whispy/short haircut with a blonde skunk patch. That being said, there were not that many douchebags. So that was cool. But I did see some parents there, which was totally lame.

The Shys:



I'm not into 'em. These California boys play a mixed bag of failingly updated classic and Southern style rock with some modern indie sound. They have some of the most BS lyrics I've ever heard. Including: "It's getting dark. I think I'm going blind." Or some shit like that. Lame. They also looked like total posers. The world wouldn't miss them if they stopped playing tomorrow and got jobs at financial firms.

The Cinematics:



I asked the lead singer after the show how he would describe their sound and he turned the question back on me. So, he's going to have to live with this description. I feel the Cinematics play a mix of up-tempo dance rock, mid-tempo ballads, and some hard rocking indie stuff. None of their music was that discernible to me except their last song, (not even sure what it's called), was pretty rocking. They definitely had a Euro look to them with super tight buttoned shirts and $200 haircuts, but I didn't think it was too much. They were there to rock. For that, I give them credit. H-man loves these dudes. I can see why, I guess.

The Night by The Numbers:

Number of Drinks between H-man and I: 6
Highest Number of Digital Cams taking pics at once during the Cinematics: 6
Rating of the Hottest Girl I saw: 7.5
The Shys on the Lame-o-meter: 7.8
The Cinematics on the Lame-o-meter: 1.8
Number of bad haircuts I saw: 3
Number of parents I saw: 4

PHOTOGRAPHY BY H-MAN