Every teacher of a high school class that is intended to increase the appreciation for poetry should be required to spend the first couple of weeks playing songs and discussing the lyrics. It should be a federal law! How many high school students walk out of a poetry appreciation class thinking, “'Fog comes on little cat feet,' hey I’m gonna love this class.”?
There may be even better choices, but what about one of The Airborne Toxic Event songs on the first day of class? “Sometime around Midnight” is a candidate, since it is an accounting of the emotions experienced by a man who chances into an encounter with a “significant other” from the past. There’s a flow to the story, and no reliance upon being able to regularly return to a chorus. Or what about "All at Once," which walks us through a person's lifetime, and each verse is the next phase of the fictional person's life.
If there is a knock on Airborne Toxic Event, it is that they seldom venture outside their “sound.” But for those of us who enjoy that sound, we can certainly live with that. With the song “The Kids Are Ready to Die,” the band does take a risk with its message. It would have been a good war-questioning song back when such protest songs were at their peak. Still, before they played the song in a 2011 show at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, the band did its best to downplay the song’s message.
The Airborne Toxic Event is a Los Angeles band. The members are Mikel Jollett (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Steven Chen (guitar, keyboards), Noah Harmon (bass, vocals), Daren Taylor (drums) and Anna Bulbrook (viola, keyboards, tambourine, vocals). The first time we saw the band (2009 at the Voodoo Lounge in San Jose (R.I.P.)), Bulbrook had not yet joined the band. The performance was solid, but adding Bulbrook's string instrument and female voice has added to the appeal to the band.
They have two albums, plus an EP ("The Secret") that was released on March 11. The third album is targeted to drop on April 16, 2013.
"Timeless" by The Airborne Toxic Event (from the recent EP)
"Safe" by The Airborne Toxic Event (from the recent EP)
"All at Once" by The Airborne Toxic Event (from the second album)
"Sometime around Midnight" by The Airborne Toxic Event (from the debut album)
"The Kids Are Ready to Die" by The Airborne Toxic Event (from the second album)
Airborne Toxic Event will
be at the Warfield in San Francisco on April 11 and at Coachella for the two
Sundays (April 14 and 21).
Their recent setlist has been:
1. All At Once
2. Wishing Well
3. Timeless
4. Half of Something Else
5. The Secret
6. Numb
7. Gasoline
8. Changing
9. True Love
10. Does This Mean You're Moving On?
11. Something New
12. Welcome to Your Wedding Day
13. Sometime Around Midnight
14. All I Ever Wanted
Encore:
1. Happiness is Overrated
2. Papillon
3. Missy / Ring of Fire / American
Girl / Born in the USA / Missy
********************************************************************************
Other SF + Coachella primers are:
The Ben Howard Post - CLICK HERE
The Jesse Ware Post - CLICK HERE
The Lumineers Post - CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment