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Review: Miike Snow at Antone’s
Sometime between Miike Snow’s booking at Antone’s and Miike Snow’s playing Antone’s, a funny thing happened: Miike Snow got just a little too big for Antone’s.
The band’s three staple members — front man Andrew Wyatt and Swedish production duo Bloodyshy and Avant — are fond of pontificating in interviews on their devil-may-care approach; Miike Snow’s origins lay in collaborative experimentation with little intent to ever tour. But their self-titled debut had “infectious indie hit” written all over it. Wyatt’s subtle lilt laid over Bloodshy and Avant’s quivering synths hit the electropop sweet spot — the detached sentiment of a-ha blended with a sense for rhythm cribbed from Prince (it’s not hard to imagine “Black and Blue” as a “Purple Rain” b-side).
The songs off “Miike Snow” failed to chart on the order of Bloodshy and Avant’s other efforts — we are talking about the two guys who wrote “Toxic” here — but they struck a chord among the kinds of folks who routinely hit up the Hype Machine. Accordingly, Tuesday night’s performance by the trio and a note-perfect backing band sold out weeks ago, despite crosstown competition from the vaguely similar (if superior) LCD Soundsystem. And Antone’s — a club that’s wholly pleasant when half or three-quarters full but bereft of decent sightlines when sold-out, and that confounding bar/stage layout doesn’t help — proved a little less than ideal. For such a fast sell-out, bookers C3 Presents might have been wise to upgrade the venue to La Zona Rosa — as they did for Mumford and Sons tonight.
Not that any of that bogged the band down. Emerging bathed in an elaborate light show, Wyatt and company made their debut clad in white face masks, embracing the anonymity central to Miike Snow’s early days of blog buzz. Wyatt kicked things off inauspiciously, with a reasonably low-energy, quiet take on “Cult Logic.” But things loosened up with an ambitious group of three of the best, catchiest tunes on “Miike Snow” — “Burial,” the aforementioned “Black and Blue” and the sinister melancholy of “Silvia.” The masks came off, the energy picked up and “Silvia” closed with a lengthy, impressive jam session, blasts of the theremin accompanying bursts of light.
Most of those electronic elements dropped away for a straight-ahead rock take on “Plastic Jungle,” an effortless evocation of the strut of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” — not, notably, a Bloodshy and Avant joint, though it easily could have been. And Miike Snow anthem “Animal” sounded livelier and more emotional live than on record — a sentiment apparent in the Antone’s audience, which hit its sing-along, clap-along height during the song. Even a limp, too-indulgent encore jam couldn’t harsh that buzz.
Update: This review has been corrected to display the correct opening song.
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By Caitlin
June 10, 2010 11:44 AM | Link to this
Thanks for the review - I had just one correction, which is that the band actually never played “Song for No One” (it’s one of only 2 they didn’t play from their debut; the other was “Faker.”) They opened with “Cult Logic.”
By Patrick Caldwell
June 10, 2010 2:57 PM | Link to this
Right you are Caitlin, thanks for the correction. I misread my notes when penning the review.