A Guilty Pleasure One Needn’t Feel Guilty About
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 16, 2006 5:57PM
It’s no secret that dancey rock and/or roll is all the rage with the kids these days. It’s also no secret that the bands practicing this style of music are dealing with critical assaults of the knee-jerk variety. For example, the more loved a band is by the proletariat the more loathed it is by the critical establishment. View the disdain hurled upon groups like The Killers and stellastarr* and the accolades showered upon Bloc Party and Death From Above 1979 for examples of the various critical reaction to dance-rock under the aegis of popularity ratios. Us? We dig all those groups and see no need to discount one or another due to something a subjective as “accessibility.”
Well, we seem to be on the third or fourth wave of this neu-new wave resurgence and two more shots were fired last week with the release of albums from both Morningwood and We Are Scientists, two groups beloved by scenesters on the Coasts. We have listened to, danced to and dug with maximum effect, both discs and consider ourselves converts. However the true test of a band of this type, that which sets the men/women from the boys/girls, is their live show. For instance, using the better known groups mentioned in the first paragraph, stellastar* and DFA 1979 know how to whip a crowd into a frenzy, The Killers and Bloc Party are not so skilled.
Well Chicago, you have a chance to divine which category at least one of the newly released groups falls into when We Are Scientists play at Subterranean this evening. The three-piece mainly operates in territory already well defined by The Killers but they do it with a touch more guitar and a smidge less of that group’s disaffected airs. Advance word from NYC is that We Are Scientists does indeed deliver the goods on-stage but Midwesterners are famously more demanding of a group when it comes to the rocking off of the collective socks. We have a good feeling We Are Scientists may be up to this demanding task though.