Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
CONTEST – Asobi Seksu @ The Drake Underground – February 1, 2010
PolyvinylI’ve easily seen Asobi Seksu live more than a half-dozen times, so I think I can say with some authority that I know what you can expect from one of their shows. Yuki Chikudate will sing angelically in English and Japanese whilst laying down swirling synth lines and whipping her hair around, James Hanna will turn launch walls of heavily-effected, heavily-amplified guitar at the audience without making eye contact, the rhythm section will probably be different from the last time they were in town, strobes will blind everyone and the band will inevitably ask for the stage lights to be turned down to almost nothing. Asobi Seksu have their thing and they do it well.
Except with their last album, they decided to do something else entirely. After taking a slight step away from the shoegazing sturm und drang of their first couple records on last year’s Hush, they followed it up quickly and unexpectedly with a live album of sorts entitled Rewolf. Recorded at London’s Olympic Studios, it featured acoustic reworkings of old material and a cover that managed to make the already dreamy-sounding band even dreamier. More a sidebar than a reinvention, it certainly showcases a different side of the band.
And as such, it’ll certainly be a different sort of show when Asobi Seksu brings their acoustic aesthetic to the Drake Underground on February 1. Somehow I don’t think the strobe lights will quite fit, even when Chikudate is really going to work on the glockenspiel. Tickets for the performance are $10 in advance, $12 at the door, but courtesy of Collective Concerts I’ve got two pairs of passes to give away for the show. To enter, email me at contests AT chromewaves.net with “I want to see Asobi Seksu” in the subject line and your full name in the body, and have that in to me before midnight, January 29.
There’s interviews with Chikudate at the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Bay-Guardian. Yeah, I think maybe the band was in San Francisco recently.
MP3: Asobi Seksu – “Thursday” (acoustic)
MP3: Asobi Seksu – “Suzanne”
Tags: Asobi Seksu
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1/23/10 7:14 pm
Kat Burns from Forest City Lovers will be opening the show, too. Tres exciting!
1/23/10 8:06 pm
Thanks for the post. I’ve never heard of them before, but I’m really digging their song, “Suzanne”.
Take care and thanks!
1/25/10 1:31 am
sweet i love both those bands