How Not to Review a Divine Fits Concert
I spent all of last Friday night at the wrong show.
I'd planned to catch the Divine Fits, the new sparse, electro-funky super collaboration between Spoon's Britt Daniel, Wolf Parade's Dan Boecker, New Bomb Turks' Sam Brown and Alexi Taylor. I'd been listening all week to A Thing Called Divine Fits, in fact, and was kind of excited about seeing it in real life. But oh, terrible thing, Divine Fits was downstairs and Conspirator, a Disco Biscuits electronic dance side project, was upstairs, and I followed the crowds without thinking, up to the big room, where a big synthesized bass drum was thumping already, four on the floor loud enough to rattle your esophagus...as it would thump for the rest of the night. I stayed up there for roughly three hours, in the vain hope that, somehow, what I was hearing would align with what I expected to hear, and sadly, figured it out only around midnight, when Divine Fits had already finished.
How could I be so stupid? How could I not know the difference? Here are seven excuses, all pretty lame:
1. A Thing Called Divine Fits is by far the most electronically rooted thing that Britt Daniel has ever done...maybe he really likes drum ‘n bass and wanted to tour with bands like that?
2. The opening band is something called Strobe Horse, which is a mostly electronic local band...the kind of outfit that could very well use laptops and keyboards and drum machines.
3. There's a drum kit behind the mountains of speakers, which I look at hopefully throughout the evening, as one act after another relies on programmed and sampled beats. (Conspirator uses live drums.)
4. If Britt Daniel were ever to dress up in sun-glasses, a furry top-hat and feather boa, don't you think he'd look sort of like this?
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