We hate tired and old rock cliches — the kind of stage antics that you have seen hundreds of times before and which indicate a stunning lack of originality. Band of Thieves and Your Vegas are ruthless purveyors of this kind of cliche on stage and in their pedestrian songs. Unfortunately, the two bands were on a bill back to back on Friday night at Bowery Ballroom and the result was an unbearable exercise in bad taste.
Band of Thieves were inexplicably described by the Village Voice as “classic rock n roll”, which would be true in its most cynical and derivative form. This is a band whose “best” song “Woman” contains such scintillating lyrics as “you’ve been running ’round uptown”. The stage act is about what you would expect, lots of prancing, strutting and chest-thumping. What followed however, was markedly worse.
We have seen hundreds of bands in the last couple of years, and Your Vegas isn’t just the worst band we’ve seen in that time, they are the worst by a wide margin. Your Vegas does deserve some kind of perverse award for employing a strikingly large and perhaps a record number of rock cliches all within their first two minutes of their first song. In terms of sound, Your Vegas used every fiber of their being to mimic U2, but unfortunately it all comes out sounding like Cutting Crew. As we maintained an involuntary painful grimace listening to this set, it because necessary to flee the venue for relief.
The sad part of this evening for us was that we did not even make it to the band who we came to see. Jupiter One play an energetic and inventive post-80s pop and this concert was a release party for their self-titled debut album. We’ll catch them again on a better bill.
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