Tagged: fangirlcrush

View the full photo set here. From the lowest of lows, to the highest of highs: Noah & the Whale played a triumphant show at Irving Plaza, their third show in New York since the release of their third album, Last Night on Earth, in March. The band's most recent album is as jubilant as [...]

View the full photoset here. Different suits, same setlist. For their second sold-out concert at the Bowery Ballroom, Noah & the Whale delivered the same show with only a few differences. From its start, the night seemed as though it might be different: in a truly bizarre moment, the band remained offstage while a track [...]

I would gladly spend my last night on earth with Noah & the Whale. This smartly dressed British quintet, with not a wrinkle to be seen in their suits, played the first of two sold-out shows at the Bowery Ballroom tonight. The new album, Last Night on Earth, received perhaps the most powerful treatment, but [...]

Every Bright Eyes album adheres to a formula, and the formula is this: a few great songs, sometimes more than a few; a few experimental songs (often with a mishmash of non-musical audio samples), but usually not too many; and usually a couple of songs that - apart from being fantastic, catchy and earnest - [...]

Tokyo Police Club and Two Door Cinema Club co-headlined the Last.fm festival at Terminal 5 on Friday night. The sold-out crowd was undeterred by a longer-than-usual wait on the sidewalk, stretching almost to the West Side Highway. It was an odd mix that included a lot of parents and a lot of young kids who [...]

TMOT's top albums of 2010 1. Weathervanes by Freelance Whales The year's most stunning debut album came from this humble band of New Yorkers with quaint instruments and a penchant for subway/sidewalk shows. Their whimsical pop songs and weightless lyricism would be shelved somewhere between Sufjan Stevens and Ra Ra Riot, with a dash of [...]

View the full photo set here. Margot & the Nuclear So & So's played the Bowery Ballroom on Sunday night, the first of two New York shows this week (tickets are still available for the Music Hall of Williamsburg show on Wednesday!) with the Lonely Forest and Cameron McGill. Because I was delinquent in missing [...]

View the full photo set here. Spoon played two shows in New York a mere five weeks ago, opening for their label-mates the Arcade Fire at Madison Square Garden. While Spoon have certainly proven that they can command a venue as large as MSG, I was beyond thrilled to hear that they would be returning [...]

Freelance Whales at Other Music on April 13, 2010. View more photos and TMOT's full coverage here. In the modern age of blogosphere bands and Youtube hits and Myspace sensations, it's incredibly refreshing to hear a new band rise above the din with organic talent and sincere musical genius. Winning over countless New Yorkers with [...]

If you didn't know anything about Spoon, you wouldn't guess that Transference is their seventh full-length album in a career that has spanned nearly 15 years so far. In fact, Transference might have been released five years ago, or five years in the future - it's difficult to attach it to this moment in musical [...]

Coming in just under the wire... The top 10 best albums of 2009, according to TRUST ME ON THIS. 1. Tonight: Franz Ferdinand by Franz Ferdinand Last December, I made an early prediction that Franz Ferdinand's January 2009 album would be on my "best of" list, and indeed it is. Alex Kapranos and company have released a [...]

TRUST ME ON THIS will be compiling two lists for 2009: best songs and best albums. Although the two lists might logically coincide, an excess of overlapping material would hardly make for an interesting read, so I've restricted myself to only one song that is also on an album that will be on the best [...]

I can't believe that I didn't see this last month - Ambulance LTD posted posted fourteen recordings on their myspace blog from their Mercury Lounge show on August 9, 2009. The downloads are high-quality (large file size) WAV files, and are absolutely fantastic! I've been eagerly snapping up every piece of news of Ambulance LTD [...]

Phoenix played a free show at the Apple Store on Prince Street in Soho on Thursday night, to be taped for "iTunes: Live from Soho." You might have have heard of Phoenix this summer, when they made the rounds on SNL, MTV, Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel. You would, however, be amiss to think that Phoenix [...]

Franz Ferdinand played an amazing set at Roseland Ballroom - exactly what you'd expect from a band so deservedly huge and critically acclaimed. My apologies for this hasty recap - my photos aren't very good, but I wanted to post the set list before my final exams begin tomorrow morning. Opening for FF were Born Ruffians, a quartet of skinny Canadians who take heavy cues from world music. For a postpunk band, they did a surprising amount of yodeling. In perhaps the most exciting moment during their set, Paul from Franz Ferdinand scurried onstage to drum on the [...]

View the full photo set here . I first heard Brooklyn's White Rabbits last July, when they opened for Spoon in Prospect Park. My assessment at the time was centered around the question, Is this a decent way to pass 45 minutes while waiting for one of my favorite bands to go onstage? At the time, my answer was yes, and my reception of White Rabbits' first record, Fort Nightly , was warm but not terribly enthusiastic; I thought that they were a solid indie rock band of the traditional postpunk formulation. [...]

Chairlift and Peter Bjorn & John played a glorious pair of electronic-pop sets at the Music Hall of Williamsburg tonight. The first opening band, Luke Top , describes themselves as "pop / soul / tropical," and I suppose that's more or less accurate. They played to a mostly-empty MHOW, but their songs were catchy yet chill, and had some great rhythmic hooks (fun fact: Luke Top's entire band bent at the knees in unison to some of the songs). I'll be keeping an eye on them in the future, seeing [...]

(View full photo set here .) Margot & the Nuclear So & So's and Cloud Cult played a sold-out Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday night. The night started with Ice Palace, a five-piece band from Minneapolis with a fondness for accentuating their songs with trumpet. They closed their set with "Thoughts/Facts," which is definitely worth listening to. (Stream it from their myspace .) Margot & the Nuclear So & So's' live performances have such incredible energy and so much action onstage. On Thursday [...]

Today, the first Monday in March, is Casimir Pulaski Day, which commemorates the Polish-American general of Revolutionary War fame, and which is only recognized in Illinois. One of my favorite songs by Sufjan Stevens is "Casimir Pulaski Day," which appears on his album Illinoise . Sufjan's lovely homegrown record label, Asthmatic Kitty, posted a demo mp3 of "Casimir Pulaski Day" some years ago. It's available for download here . I much prefer the album version of "Casimir Pulaski Day," which is a truly exquisite example of Sufjan's acoustic-folk-rock prowess, but this demo is a great cut [...]

I'll spare you the protracted narrative regarding my travels to and from Hoboken. (Suffice it to say that I'm never going to Maxwell's again.) Ambulance LTD was worth all of the trouble that I went to that night in April, and I think that I first suspected that I ran into the danger of exhausting my vocabulary of superlatives when writing about Ambulance LTD's show last July. Maxwell's is one of the smaller, more low-key venues that I've been to in the New York area. The musicians are obliged to load and unload their instruments from the front [...]