Your Underdog Show of the Week: Future Punx and Roses at Death by Audio
Everything’s coming up Roses. Geddit?!
It’s high season for live music in NYC, with all those outdoor shows being crammed into whatever time we have left before the earth turns gray and barren and we’re forced to live in solitary confinement because it’s TOO DAMN COLD TO LEAVE OUR TINY, TINY APARTMENTS. That’s why you really should see Conor Oberst at Central Park SummerStage tonight and Wiz Khalifa at Jones Beach on Thursday. Get out there and be a socially adapted human while you still can. But there’s more. More shows to see this week. And many of them are at the end of the sunshiny outdoor spectrum in terms of venues and fanfare.
Take, for instance, the bill at Death by Audio on Friday. Local headliners Future Punx align with Devo in their childlike take on what the future sounds like. Tracks from their debut 7” are blocky and rigid, rippled with robotic vocals that sound lifted from a B-movie soundtrack, then brushed off by Talking Heads whimsicality. They’re cheekily super serious about it, all pokerfaced stares and celestial-themed costumes, as if the pop accessibility of their songs is meant to be kept a secret.
Roses, from L.A. and featuring Abe Vigoda‘s Juan Velasquez on guitar, are inherently more relaxed, their keyboard-pop recalling a mellowed-out Future Islands if their baritone frontman did more daydreaming than dramatic dances and finally drank some herbal tea to soothe his throat. Dreamlover, their debut EP out August 5 via homegrown Brooklyn label Group Tightener, is bound to include at least one summer sleeper hit (probably two because [1] listen to this and [2] watch that video below).
Perfectly imperfect garage-rockers Darlings, who we haven’t stopped writing about since the dawn of time, and impossible-to-Google-band-from-Philadelphia The Beds kick off the night. We think it’ll be the best $10 you spend all week, and we are never wrong about anything ever.
Follow Lauren Beck on Twitter @heylaurenbeck.
