January 17, 2010

The Drums

“We kind of forgot to care about being cool or what people thought.”

» The Drums – Let’s Go Surfing (2:54) – 3.9MB mp3 @ 184kbps

I first encountered the Drums last July, when my friend Sean* booked them for the Jezebel Music monthly showcase at Public Assembly. He convinced me to go with the simple claim that “They’re awesome.” Prior to seeing them, I had a vague notion that they might sound like the Liars, probably because I conflated their name (the only thing I knew about them at the time) with Drum’s Not Dead. I was dead wrong: the two bands fall on opposite ends of the rock spectrum (though both bands display a solid command of harmony), which I might have suspected when Sean mentioned that he liked the song with whistling. If the Liars specialize in making meaning from avant noise, the Drums achieve a pure pop aesthetic by channeling 50’s surf-rock with 80’s post-punk undertones.

In any case, Sean was right: they were awesome, putting on one of their much-hyped high-energy shows and I ended up picking a copy of the Summertime EP (which was available at the show before its official release a month later). It was as good as anything I heard last year.

The Drums at Bowery Ballroom on January 13th; Will Deitz for Pitchfork (click for full set)

They’ve played at least a million shows since last summer, mostly in NYC (including a sold-out show at Bowery Ballroom last Wednesday), and it seems that they are going to be quite buzzy busy in the new year.

Anyway, the Drums are featured in the latest issue of ‘Sup Magazine, which has an interview and a super-washed-out/overexposed photo shoot by Milan Zrnic. They’ve also been interviewed by Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan (more mp3s) in the past couple months.

Let’s hope they don’t get washed out or overexposed in 2010.

(Yes this post would have made more sense last week, before the concert at Bowery Ballroom.)

*Sean made a brief appearance in my adventures last Thursday; he had actually booked another Jezebel gig that very night, which was where he went after we ate at Vinnie’s.