Me and Giuliani Down By the Schoolyard*

Last night New York City's !!! played the Magic Stick here in Detroit. This band is so similar to what's going on in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) right now, i.e. the Rapture, DFA, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, yet somehow they're different. Maybe it's a lack of hipster holier-than-thou attitude, I don't know. At some point last night, someone who was seeing them for the first time was talking to me, and I said it's like they're The Rapture without pretense. The lineup of !!! includes a drummer, no I should say percussionist, because this guy was sick, playing the trap and latin percussion and all kinds of stuff I couldn't even see. A lot of similar acts rely on drum machines for most of their beats, not !!!. They also have two guitarists, two singers, and a bassist. Then, there's a guy who plays the keyboard/sampler/sequencer/drum machine and the trumpet! In the last song, someone else was onstage playing a tenor sax, it was crazy. Okay, so if you don't know anything about the band, I'm sure you want to know what they sound like. F-f-f-funky. They look like a bunch of former punk rock kids who just gave in to the beat. Their stuff is endlessly danceable. It's a constant groove that seems like it could go on forever. Yet it doesn't sound trendy, and they don't look like they're striking a pose. Okay, one of the singers seemed to think that he was in a metal band, but he didn't sound like it (thank god). The other singer sang in a falsetto most of the time, which added a touch of late '70s funk like Chic.

Outside of all of that, I just have to say...how bold is it to name your band with puncuation? I mean really, it's difficult to say, you can't pronounce it without saying "exclamation point exclamtion point exclamation point." I'm glad they came up with a way to deal with pronounciation: (chk chk chk).

Opening act Thunderbirds Are Now! couldn't be any more appropriate. Their hyper spaz new wave romanticism just keeps getting better and better. This town needed the Allen brothers to inject a little somethin' somethin' into the scene.


*listen to !!!