Saturday brought yours truly to Call the Office for the umpteenth time, this time for to see Manitoba and Junior Boys.
Junior Boys are made up of two blokes who hail from, of all places, Hamilton, Ontario. Or at least last night they were; the internet tells me that there was supposed to be an extra bloke. While I haven’t thought of myself as a Hamiltononian often, listening to the blissed out music these fellows produce, makes me proud to consider myself half living there. I would not have considered them much of a live band. Their music soars and oozes so well because of the immaculate construction it undergoes in the studio. They did a good job of taking over the stage though, and I was surprised to see the lead singer dude strumming away on his guitar, while the other dude strummed away on bass, plinked on keyboards and fiddled with his Mac. They did not have a lot of stage presence as far as theatrics and posing around were concerned, and that was probably for the best as the music did most of the speaking for them. It did not sound quite as good in a live setting as throbbing out from an awesome set of headphones attached to my home stereo, but it was still definitely worth seeing them do it live. Especially for them, to expose their sound to a wider audience, who hopefully were suitably impressed no matter how much they thought they sounded like Depeche Mode. The sound Junior Boys constructs is so carefully placed together, each element of the production stands out, each tick of electronic drum and each swoosh of synth sounds as if it is exactly in the right place. It sounds very futuristic, very clean, very cool, familiar yet exciting and original, and it builds one hell of an atmosphere. Dan Snaith commented during Manitoba’s set that “these guys are gonna be big!” I would have to agree. They have what it takes to appeal to the masses… the hipsters, the indie fans, the dance-lovers, the hip hop kids, and hotdamn are they groovy. If there was ever a perfect soundtrack to driving through the night, this is it. Car commercial, anyone? Plus! The lyrics and singing are actually really good and totally don’t shit up the songs like lyrics in electronic music often have a tendency of doing. Well done. The major problem with the performance is that they didn’t play for nearly long enough, and they didn’t have any vinyl of their new album on sale at the merch table in back.
Manitoba was next. They (that is, three people, one of which was assumedly Dan Snaith, since Manitoba is widely reported to be a one man band… I think he was the one who did all the talking and pandering for crowd noise) arrived on stage wearing bear masks over their faces, and set about creating noisy layers of guitars and sound effects, tambourines, recorders, xylophones, and lots and lots of drums. The vocals were pre-recorded, which was an interesting choice. I think it was necessary, though, given the cacophany they were all busy creating. There was a projector showing music videos, and random other sorts of videos while they played away. That was very cool and uncharacteristically high-tech for Call The Office. It’s really rather hard to know how how much of the performance was done live, it was also at times quite difficult to discern one sound from another in the bombastic wall of sound that issued forth. When both drum kits got hammering at the same time, it was quite the experience! Overall, very intense, very cool, and they went the extra mile in making music wouldn’t necessarily work live into a great performance. Their set also seemed perhaps slightly short, though I think they went through at least the vast majority of Up In Flames, so I don’t know what more there was for them to do. All in all good stuff!..though I am not sure that they were justified in charging 3x what a normal cto show costs.
Pictures of the abovementioned proceedings are housed here