NME.com
Posted on 08/08/08 at 08:28:49 pm
Occasionally you get lucky and stumble across a band at the very moment they ignite the engines and blast off into the heavens.
Such a band right now is Los Feliz’s The Airborne Toxic Event, a wired and ballistic cross between The Arcade Fire, Coldplay, The Walkmen and a black-hearted Clash. A lanky Russell Brand-a-like plays bass (sometimes with a violin bow), a girl in a dress like a straight jacket throws padded-room shapes at the violin, tambourine and keyboard and the music just gets louder and richer until it makes Paris Hilton look like a mute wallflower and practically bursts at the seams and spills its steaming guts across the stage during the monumental set closer that hasn’t even made the finished album in the US.
TATE had clearly been building their local fanbase for some years and last night felt like the joyous culmination of all that hard work as 800 adoring Toxicites grabbed one of the several hundred complimentary tambourines and jangled along to ‘Sometime Around Midnight’ (their big local radio hit) and singer Mikel seemed overwhelmed by the response as if last night was a breakthrough stage of the band’s career.
Today they hit Number 17 in the iTunes rock chart with their debut album and this afternoon they face the gruelling blowtorch death-by-MGMT-comparison that is the NME Radar interview. Meanwhile it turns out they share a manager with The Bravery, a band whom regular readers will know try to kill me with tequila at any opportunity they get.
Could be a long night…
Tonight’s gig: out drinking with The Airborne Toxic Event
On the iPod on the way to work: Ben Folds ‘Way To Normal’