I’ll Give You Candy

The B-52’s @ Roseland Ballroom 10/31/2007
Party Out Of Bounds / Mesopotamia / Pump / Private Idaho / Ultraviolet / Give Me Back My Man / Strobe Light / Julia of the Spirits / Roam / Funplex / Hot Corner / Channel Z / Keep This Party Going / Love Shack // Planet Claire / Rock Lobster / Love in the Year 3000

I promise you that the fact that I posted about both the B-52’s and the Rapture just recently was a total coincidence — I didn’t even know that this show was happening til the morning I wrote up that remix of “The Sound.” It’s just a really lucky thing for me given that I just happened to be listening to the B-52’s quite a bit lately, apropos of nothing at all.

The B-52’s are about as rad as you might imagine in person. Sure, they’re older now and can’t quite muster the full-on energy on display in footage of them in their prime, but they still bring it hard. It should come as no surprise that they were at their best on the seven new songs in the set, all of which were instantly enjoyable and very B-52’s-ish without sounding as though they’ve been locked in a time capsule and hidden away from the influence of the past twenty years of pop music. Clearly they have a lot of confidence in the new material, or at least enough for unheard material to take up nearly half of last night’s set, squeezing out classics like “Dance This Mess Around,” “52 Girls,” “Hero Worship,” and “Quiche Lorraine.” The oldies that were performed were just as fun as I’d hoped, though “Love Shack” was a tiny bit disappointing with its slightly slowed-down arrangement.

The B-52’s “Give Me Back My Man” – This song, though — wow! Understandably, they weren’t able to recreate the particular brittle, hollow sound of the original studio recording that I love so much, but the wounded feeling of song was intensified by the thicker sound of the live guitar, and a bold vocal performance by Cindy Wilson that made the most of the fact that her voice is not nearly as girlish as it was back in 1980. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

The Rapture @ Roseland Ballroom 10/31/2007
Don Gon Do It / Down For So Long / Get Myself Into It / Sister Savior / The Devil / Piece of the People We Love / Whoo! Alright – Yeah… Uh Huh / House of Jealous Lovers / First Gear / Olio

The Rapture “Pieces of the People We Love (Live in SoHo 2006)” – Sure, the audience may have been a lot more nuts for their show at Webster Hall almost exactly a year ago, but this was definitely the best performance by the Rapture that I’ve witnessed. It was the sort of thing where you just have to be in awe of how completely they control those songs, and how much joy and effort they put into them even though they’ve been playing them over and over for the past year or two. All that, and the sound was fantastic, and LOUD. It’s become pretty obvious to me that the band deliberately mix the drums much louder than what would be considered normal, and the effect is very powerful and visceral, though it’s also potentially quite dangerous to the hearing of anyone in the audience. (My ears are still ringing and I was in the middle of the hall.) (Click here to buy the original version from Amazon, and here to buy the full session from iTunes.)