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Live review: Airborne Toxic Event
The Airborne Toxic Event are a band from Los Angeles. They formed in 2006 and have a hit single called “Sometime Around Midnight” that sounds an awful lot like the Arcade Fire. An awful lot.
In fact, there’s a lot about the band that smacks of the Arcade Fire. There’s the name with its definite article followed by an “A” word, five or six more syllables, connotations both literary and base. (Arcade Fire recalls video arcades and the Parisian arcades that Walter Benjamin loved so much; Airborne Toxic Event is both a Don DeLilo reference and, well, a joke about broken wind.) Both bands favor suits or black clothing, melodramatic singing and rolling, epic songs short through with violin and keyboards.
Unfortunately, they’re nowhere near as willfully strange and pretentious as Arcade Fire, and while their energetic sounds seemed to foot the bill Saturday in the pouring rain, it was hard to see them as more than a flavor of the moment. Or maybe it was just that it was awfully hard to take a band seriously when the lead singer says he has no idea how the assembled crowd has every heard of them when anyone with access to MTV2 has seen the video for “Sometime Around Midnight” an awful lot.
Come on, man.
Ricardo B. Brazziell photo
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Permalink | | Categories: ACL 2009: Saturday, ACL Festival 2009
