LIVE MUSIC: Justice @ The 9:30 Club - 3/21/12

As one of the few people who fully embraced Justice’s flirtation with prog rock on Audio, Video, Disco (see our review here), I was very interested to see how the new direction would manifest in the live show. Interestingly enough, the way the French electro duo decided to bring their homage to prog rock to the stage was by mashing the new material up with the heavy, dark, beat-driven sounds of their first album. However, the pyschedelic, high-end focused, melody-driven tracks from AVD can’t really stand up to the more powerful in-your-face beats of Cross.

The result was a performance that, for me, more closely resembled their previous sold-out 9:30 Club performance almost exactly four years earlier than the material on the album they are currently promoting. That said, while the performance did not seem as experimental or challenging as AVD, the crowd at this year’s sold-out 9:30 Club performance was treated to an evening of hard-hitting, nearly nonstop beats served up by one of the biggest names in dance music.

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Best of 2011 Day 1: Ethan's Top 10

It's finally here! We've reached the end of yet another year, and as is the custom it's now our duty to try and make some sort of sense of the good, the bad and the outright ugly and put it all into list form for your consumption. Why do we do this? A need for some sense of order? A byproduct of our secret desire to have bands fight it out Hunger Games style for the title of SUPREME MUSICAL OVERLORDS of the year? Who knows.  

Now, here at ChunkyGlasses, we all have some wildly varying tastes. Sure there is a common ground, but the phrase "what in the f@#$" has been thrown around quite a bit this year (more often than not by me) as we've made our journey through the musical landscape that 2011 has presented us with. With that in mind you won't ever see an absolute top 10 list. We like too many types of music for that. Instead we're going to give you our individual lists and let you take from that what you will.

So let's get to it. First up we have Ethan's list for the best albums of the year.

Hope you've got your dancin' shoes on.

- Kevin

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#10: EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints

Grungey, dark, emotional and hard hitting.  EMA takes her time, this is an unrushed album so full of slow builders that it is hard to believe that it is only 37 minutes long.  At times the pacing is maybe even a little too slow.

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Real (Electronic) Rock N' Roll: The Glitch Mob @ The 9:30 Club - 7/20/11

Words: Ethan Lucarelli
Photos: Kevin 

Let me begin by saying that, Glitch Mob is not my favorite electronica group.  I listen to their LP, Drink The Sea, as well as their recently released EP, We Can Make The World Stop, fairly regularly: I dig their sound, but ultimately I think they need to expand their range a bit before they take the next step. However, any critiques of their studio work notwithstanding, after their show at the 930 Club on Wednesday, I can safely say that they are the best live electronica group I have ever seen.

Glitch Mob, in its current incarnation, is an L.A.-based group of three DJ/producers: Justin “Boreta” Boreta, Ed “ediT” Ma, and Josh “Ooah” Mayer.  Their sound has been described variously as trip hop, breaks, electro, hip hop, dub step (which is laughable), intelligent dance music, and (somewhat circularly) glitch hop.  Their production is uniformly driven by deep, distorted, at times nearly monotone basslines complemented by huge kick drums, filtered snares, distorted, and synth melodies and samples interspliced and cut up with a turntablist’s sensibility.  Their live set moves fairly seamlessly from full-on body rocking slow breakbeats to slightly more uptempo, but no less heavy, straight beats.

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