So the In The City music conference is going on this week, but only lasts for two days so basically you could blink and miss the entire thing. I'm honestly pretty underwhelmed by the whole thing, considering that there are only a handful of bands playing the entire festival.
My boyfriend and his bandmate did attend some of the panels yesterday and found some of them to be really interesting and some just basically a waste of time. I met up with them once they were done becoming even more jaded about the state of the music industry and we went over to Irving Plaza (or the Fillmore blah blah blah) for a Nylon party featuring two things that I generally really like: british bands and free vodka - pretty much in that order depending on the day.
Opening acts Bloody Social and the Plasticines were fine but in the end utterly forgettable. Bloody Social have enough long hair to flail around that they appear to have been transported here from early 90's Seattle and Plasticines are an all female group who did one good cover but I don't even remember what that was. The Misshapes and Steve Aoki were djing, except I'm pretty sure Steve didn't pay a minute of attention to the Misshapes set because he kept replaying the same songs they had played, except he played remixes (btw, the remix of Bjork's "Earth Intruders" is pretty awesome, if anyone wants to send it to me). In between bands they were also playing a lot of "Nylon tv," the gist of which apparently involves a lot of people who are cooler than me doing random stuff in random countries for no apparent actual purpose other than to be cool.
So the culmination of all of this was a live performance by Razorlight, which turned out to be lead singer Johnny Borrell backed by a random five person gospel choir who seemed nothing if not totally amused by the entire thing. Despite the sparse crowd, Johnny ended up giving a pretty great performance, eventually explaining that the choir were subbing in for the band's drummer who was ill and back in the UK. If I were them, I'd consider keeping the five additional singers around though -- they def. added something great to the performance - some soul. Johnny kept his shirt on unfortunately, I have no idea if Kirsten Dunst was there or not, and when the vodka dried up, made my way home to bed.
This was an exceptionally long blog entry for me. Hope you liked it.
Razorlight - America