"I'm Happy Because I'm Stupid"

The Boy Least Likely To. The Roxy. 6/3/06.

Thanks to the combined effort and musical awareness of Phil and ProphecyBoy, I found myself at a show in one of the famous rock clubs on the Sunset Strip, The Roxy, last night listening to several bands of which I knew nothing, and the result was a truly delightful evening.

The Boy Least Likely To*, the headline band of the show, is a band from the UK with happy sounds and ecclectic instrumentation, and I'm quite glad to have been introduced to them. They have an extemely fun stage presence which includes a lot of clapping and good-natured jokes and insults between band members, so the live show was quite entertaining even though I had only heard a couple of their songs before I attended the show. Their songs sound poppy and summery, but the lyrics are quite dark and cynical, which I adore. My favorite song by far is "Monsters," which is about childhood friends getting married and having children. It's truly wonderful. The title of this post is from "Be Gentle With Me" which says "I just want to sparkle for a moment/Before I just fizzle out and die." This adorable band makes me totally happy, but not in a sappy way; the disillusionment and tang of bitterness only makes it better.

The Bicycles* were a brilliant choice for an opening band for The Boy Least Likely To; they were also fairly happy-sounding but mature, and their music was a good complement to The Boy Least Likely To without being too similar. They also really seemed to be having fun onstage. They had me hooked from the moment they took the stage; they began with a few beautiful notes as a demonstration of their vocal skills before bringing in rock instrumentation. This band consists of an extremely unusual group of people, which makes them a fascinating combination onstage. They're from Toronto and they're melange of styles and ethnicities. The two main singers, who appear to be called "Meatball" and "Doctor Ew" have lovely high voices and some real vocal talent. Meatball especially has fabulous rock star hair. Personally, I was totally in love with "Danatater," the girl playing the drums. It's not nearly often enough that you get to see a girl rocking out on a drum set, and she did it quite well. And after the show she had adorably nerdy glasses on - I totally have a new crush.

Their music was totally fun, and I highly recommend that you check it out, except that it seems shockingly unavailable other than the 4 songs you can hear on MySpace. Their album, The Good, The Bad, and the Cuddly is apparently quite new and is not on iTunes. You can purchase it for download it at Zunior.com, but I'm a little nervous about doing so because my computer keeps warning me that their security certificate is invalid. Clearly, I should have bought the CD at the show, but I failed to do so. Making the whole thing even more dubious, the band's website isn't functioning, which, according to this blog post* might be because they've failed to pay their webhosting bill. Someone needs to help these kids with marketing immediately, because all their touring isn't going to do them much good, no matter how fabulous they are, if people can't easily buy their music anywhere.

The first band of the evening, Trainwreck Riders were some scruffy boys from San Fransisco, and they were also fairly enjoyable, but not nearly as memorable. I couldn't hear a word they said because the instrumentation drowned out the vocals, which perofoundly irritated me. Their music was an interestingly tough sort of country rock - there were song titles like "Ol' Timey Feeling" and occasional bouncy country rhythms, but they also seemed very rock 'n' roll to me and they looked more like whiney rocker boys, complete with fabulous glasses on the lead singer. I'd give them another chance if given the opporunity to see them again, but they paled in comparison to the two bands that followed them.


*MySpace