From ali Sent Mon, May 31st 1999, 00:07
From ali Sent Mon, May 31st 1999, 00:07
ok, this review is a little late in coming, as the show was about two weeks ago. but i've been pretty busy with tests and whatnot. so, you know... my friends and i arrived at tramps (in new york city) at about 11pm. we thought it officially started at 10, and experience dictates that you should get their an hour late (at least) for these things. in actuality it started at 9. so we missed the first band, the storm and the stress. i don't know anything about them, but i would have been interested in checking them out. oh well. soon after we stepped in, mika vainio and ilpo väisänen (i'm guessing) got up on stage and proceeded to rock the house. they played a good mix of old and new stuff, though i'm not too sure about what all the old stuff is, since the only other pan sonic album i have is "kulma". they started off kinda mellow, to ease the crowd in. they sounded really good on the big sound system over at tramps. i guess pan sonic is just meant to be played loudly. :) the songs they played off "a" were quite noticably altered... that's to say they didn't just pop in the cd and hit play, which is nice. the versions they played were a good deal noisier than the album versions. pan sonic was noisy in a good way, in a way few artists know how to do effectively IMO. they played one song with a really evil beat that sounded like there were huge noisy airplanes going from one side of the room to the other. really excellent. they ended with a really incredible version of "telakoe", track 15 off of "a". it started off much the same way, but the noise they start playing further into the track was a lot of developed and overwhelming in the live version. the song ended in an earsplitting noisebath that was completely mesmerizing and mindnumbing at the same time. i really wish i had that on tape. all in all, they played for about 45 minutes. it seemed like it was much shorter. i would really like to see a show with just them, maybe in a slightly smaller place. oh well. trans am went on about a half hour or so later, with their cool-as-shit vocoders on. i recognized "futureworld" off their futureworld album, but i can't really tell you what else they played since i don't have any of their albums. then they got off the stage briefly and left something off of "kulma" playing (i think) which i thought was somewhat unusual. they came back on in about 5 minutes and played into the song, then gradually faded out the panasonic. the rest of the show was less electronic, and a lot more indie rock oriented. trans am put on a really tight set. the songs they played couldn't have been too easy to do either... there was a lot of changing up and lots of halting stops and starts in their songs. the last song they played was somewhat boring and i was ready to get out of there at that point, but all in all pretty good. the trans am singer is a cool guy... he was so monotone and business-like when he addressed the crowd that it was kinda funny. i liked pan sonic a lot better, but it was a great show overall. about the crowd... new york crowds at concerts are cool in some ways, but shitty in others. everyone seemed to really appreciate the music (or at least they pretended too... maybe they were just being pretentious) whereas in other cities i've seen shows in, people might be less open-minded and get impatient for the headlining group (trans am). it's weird that nobody danced or anything during some of trans am's songs. if it were in new orleans, i know the crowd would have been going buck-wild. i think there would have even been some moshing for pan sonic. :) oh well... this is my first review, so let me know about any comments or anything you might have. i'm going to try and write some more reviews now that i have some free time. mostly of recent cd purchases. laterz, -ali _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com