You're probably sick of all these Siren Fest posts by now...

Siren Fest, for those of you non-New Yorkers is the one day a year when nearly a dozen of your favorite indie bands descend upon Coney Island for a free festival of music, gross "vbrancyy beverages" and buckets of sweat. The real draw for me this year was Frightened Rabbit, whose album latest album The Midnight Organ Fight made my top 10 of 2008. The adorable Scottish lads commanded the stage with a vigor and urgency that defied the heat. There energy was made all the more impressive considering they were wearing what looked to be pretty heavy plaid button downs. Major props for suffering for fashion! Tons of videos of their performance here. Like the girl in front of me sad, "You can't fake those accents!".




I also managed to catch the last few songs by Future of the Left (aka the dudes from the now defunct McClusky), whom the boyfriend and many others claim were the highlight of Siren Fest. From what I heard it was some pretty banging Welsh punk.


Also how endearing were Japandroids. The duo claimed they've never seen this many people in their lives. Awww, Canadians.

Oh and hey Grand Duchy, Black Francis and his wife played a neat little set as well.

I didn't stick around for The Raveonettes or Built to Spill, as I was party-pooped out. (Besides, I'm the girl that always kills the party anyway).

Oh and p.s. - the sound quality sounded slightly better this year, or at least louder anyways. Though the bands still had to compete with the ROAR of the cyclone, at least Japandroids beat it.

The Modern Leper - Frightened Rabbit

"We used to dream. Now we worry about dying"

I must say there are a shit ton (that's a technical term) of trendy bands jumping on the lo-fi revival bandwagon. Fuzzy, scuzzy rock seems to be all the rage lately. Which is cool and all if that's your thing. As for me, well I like my noise in small doses. Just a smidge of distortion and reverb on, oh say, one song per album and I usually have my fill. This basically means I'm ill-equipped to review gazillions of albums (that's another technical term). However there is one little song on one noisy-as-hell album that totally took me by surprise.
Canadian duo Japandroids released a balls-illy titled album called Post-Nothing, which sorta implies that they are beyond aesthetic labels and genres etc. It's a great big middle finger of a title and sonically they live up to that mischeviousness with their great big squalls of sound. Anyway, as I was listening to this album, primarily out of the desire to expand my ears beyond the realm of indie-acoustic-pop prettiness but mostly because I'm a sucker for the bro-mantic cover photo, I was caught off guard. Because "Young Hearts Spark Fire" is a wallop of awesome. It's a bit like a kick to the gut, but one that stutters and trips before it hits you. Not to mention the repition of this ominious line: "We used to dream. Now we worry about dying". Powerful stuff.

Post-Nothing is being re-released on Polyvinyl August 4.

Young Hearts Spark Fire - Japandroids