LiveDC: The Long Blondes / Drug Rug @ The Hotel

May 21, 2008 by william alberque  Send to a Friend

“Just when you’re ready to take on the world…”

all photos: Chris Chen

There is no way to account for the lack of a sell-out tonight for the Long Blondes. They are one of the best young bands recording today. Their debut album, “Someone to Drive You Home,” produced by Pulp’s Steve Mackey, exceeded all expectations. The second album, “Couples,” produced by the new “it” producer, Erol Alkan, takes the band in a bold new direction, embracing risks while still delivering brilliant lyrics. Yet somehow, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hotel is less than half full.

The opening act, the oddly-named Drug Rug, was far more entertaining than I would have guessed. “It was like watching your little sisters’ band! They were cute…” said a friend of mine, generously. I thought they were like a (much) younger version of Bardo Pond, piling up the psychadelic shoegaze as though it were 1974 and Can’s Holger Czukay were going to jump up to the soundboard. Entertaining, but an odd choice to open for the Long Blondes.

Then again, in the last week or so, I’ve seen Cut Copy and Black Kids sell out the Black Cat to beyond capacity, while Los Campesinos! and British Sea Power both played to healthy, 500-plus crowds. The
relative emptiness of the Hotel isn’t down to the openers, and it’s not the weather (glorious, humidity-free), nor the day of the week – Saturday night should be a dead cert to pack the ‘house. So why is
this place not cheek-to-jowl with blog-savvy hipsters, curious on-lookers and the rest of the usual suspects? Vampire Weekend sold the Hotel out, while Snowden barely had 100 onlookers for their
stellar show last week.
What is up?

“And there’ll always be a phone to ring at three in the morning, and you’ll always have someone who’ll drive you home.”

There are no clues forthcoming from the band’s performance. The ‘Blondes mix nine tracks from the new album with half a dozen gems from their debut. They play with confidence and poise, and Kate
Jackson, the lead singer, dominates the stage – indeed the room – with her mesmerizing sexuality. Dorian take turns between guitars and various keyboards, as the under-noticed, but lovely and talented second guitarist Emma adds some drone keyboards to the mix. The rhythm section, comprising of the amusingly white-boy-afro’d Screech and the beautiful, pouty Reenie, play po-faced, with military precision. The audience that bothers to show up reacts well, singing along with their favorites and dancing with abandon to the incredibly dance-driven rhythms of the new ones.

“What about us? What about us? My friends come round and they ask me ‘What about us?’”

Starting with the colder-than-cold sentiments of “Here Comes the Serious Bit,” (”I could be a shoulder to cry on or I could be a body to lie on, but don’t ask me for more than that”) they grab the audience’s attention. Nice, big intro, leads to a winning song, but this is just a tease. They break immediately into “Weekend without Makeup,” a much-loved, but brutal paean to a failed relationship, following with an older, obscure b-side, “Autonomy Boy.” The crowd is clearly having a good time, and rewarded by two more new songs, “Round the Hairpin,” and “Erin O’Connor,” before unleashing the sublime shout-along “Separated by Motorways.” “I Liked the Boys,” one of two songs on the new album written by Kate, bleeds into the recent vinyl-only single, “Century.” The swirling synths and disco-stomp mix with the full-blooded guitars and Kate’s marvelously new-wave vocals. “Too Clever by Half,” comes next, preceding my favorite song from the first album, “You Could Have Both.” I could write a treatise about how the lyrics of this bit of genius floored me; how the different phases of the song build to an extraordinary climax, but I would instead recommend that you listen to it carefully while looking at Kate as she sings it full-bore looking into your eyes. Wow.

“I know I’ll never have you completely alone, so I’m trying to draw up a contingency plan.”

“Couples,” the title-track off the new album, comes next, but is again trumped by another classic – “Once and Never Again,” a song about a woman showing a 19-year old girl “the ropes.” “Guilt,” and “I’m Going to Hell,” lead to the perfect set-closer, the instant classic, “Giddy Stratospheres.” They encore with the lead track (and resurrected b-side) from the first album, “Lust in the Movies,” leading the remaining fans through a list of screen icons – “Edie Sedgwick, Anna Karina, Arlene Dahl,” (and dropping in an irresistible reference to another Sheffield band from an earlier generation, chanting, “NAG, NAG, NAG!”) before going off to tremendous applause.

“And it’s obvious that you’re a man that’s after her own heart, but you know where I am, and you know that you could have both…”

Afterwards, guitarist and songwriter Dorian Cox greets me with breathless excitement. I’m worried that he’ll be down about the turnout or the crowd reaction, or the terrible DJing between sets (mine). Instead, he stuns me by gushing about the wonderful Washington, DC, audiences, the turnout and their reaction. They’re too kind, Washington, and you all owe this band better.

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