I caught The Libertines with Radio 4 at neumo’s last night. I’ve never heard anything about The Libertines aside from hype that they were the next big thing out of Britain, but it was a relatively cheap show so i figured i would check them out. The venue itself was pretty small and intimate, it’s kinda like The Bronze from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; one big room with an elevated stage for the band so you can get up close and personal with their shoes. We actually found a perch on the second level that overlooked the stage from the side, so we were able to see them play their instruments without other people’s heads in the way.

i haven’t heard anything about radio 4 either, and aside from some cool bongo drums, a 14″ powerbook that one of the guys was using and a guitarist that looked like the lead singer from tea party, i can’t say much about them either. but that was fine, i didn’t come to watch them so it was no loss. afterwards, we watched the stage people pull down radio 4‘s equipment and set up the sound system. this consisted of some british guy yelling “yeah yeah” and “hey” for an hour, which was a lot more boring than it sounds. the guy was trying to adjust the equalizer settings on the various mics so that they would be *perfect*. it’s a rock concert for goodness sakes not the toronto symphony.

anyways with much ado, the libertines finally got on. i’ve read on the web that they were the english strokes, and that’s a very accurate description of them. they lead singer dressed up in a tight leather jacket just like the strokes, they were stomping like them and their music sounded like them too. the only thing that stood out as being different was the black guy on drums, but he was an awesome drummer. the bassist was awesome as well and there were a lot of killer bass lines. along with the fact that i like the strokes it turned out to be an great concert, which means i’ll have to get their albums at some point.

a couple of funny things were that since we were standing above them, we saw their set list and what they were gonna play. there was a gap between their first 19 songs and their last 3 songs, which seemed to indicate that they would do an encore. it was kinda funny that they planned an encore ahead of time, but then they pulled a fast one on us when they took a request from a girl in the front row and actually played 4 songs for their encore. the front row was also lined with girls, libertine groupies no doubt. we couldn’t really hear any of the vocals on the songs, but that might be because we weren’t in front of the stage so that was a disappointing part of the night.

in the car, i’ve been listening to the kleptones’ a night at the hip-hopera which is basically old and new school rap mashed up with classic queen tracks. it sounds like an odd combo, and some of it is fairly odd, but there are some sick mashups on there featuring well known rappers like missy elliot and everyone’s favorite o.d.b. if you have a chance, check out track 15 and 16 where the beastie boys are rapping, it’s crazy. i believe it’s a bootleg mix so like the grey album, don’t expect to see it in hmv anytime soon. i’ve also been digging the thrills’ new album let’s bottle bohemia, which didn’t get good reviews (6/10 usually) but i like it.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: concerts, music, seattle