photos by Jessica Amaya

One day after they played the Brooklyn Flea, Camera Obscura headlined Grand Ballroom (with the addition of a string section) as part of their current tour with The Love Language. More pictures and the headliner's setlist from last night's show (6/7), below...

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photos by Samantha Marble

Willie Nelson performed a special acoustic album release show Thursday night at Grand Ballroom in NYC. Samantha says, "The entire show was incredible from beginning to end. Willie played tirelessly for over 2 hours straight in an intimate room on a modestly small stage at the Grand Ballroom. It was unreal. He covered all of his classics including "On The Road Again", "Always On My Mind" and "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain". By the third to last song the entire crowd was out of their seats dancing around in front of the stage and it stayed that way. When he finished his set he came out to greet fans, shake hands from the stage and hand out bandannas. This man that's been performing for over 40 years and he still seemed to have the soul of a young man. It was an honor to watch him play." More pictures from the show below...

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photos by Chris La Putt, words by Black Bubblegum

Good things don't always come in pairs, but the Opeth/Enslaved tour did, and the bands gave a second helping to the NYC-area last night (5/26), a little less than a month after they played Starland Ballroom in NJ. About.com was at that Jersey show:

The Norwegian band [Enslaved] has slowly evolved from a Viking/black metal hybrid to include more progressive influences, sounding like a trip to hell with Wish You Were Here blasting out of the car speakers. Their 45-minute set was workman-like in its execution, with little time for interaction with the crowd...

For two hours, Opeth tore the roof off the Starland Ballroom. The Swedish band played material from nearly every album, only skipping Orchid. Opening with a new tune, "Heir Apparent," frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt had a commanding stage presence from the start. Joking around with the audience about Skid Row, Bon Jovi, the swine flu, and the well-known New Jersey record store Vintage Vinyl, Åkerfeldt has a quirky sense of humor that was front and center throughout the live set....

The band sounded tight and avoided the sound issues that Enslaved ran into earlier in the night. The crowd responded well to the Watershed material, as well as fan favorites "Deliverance" and "The Leper Affinity." ...As a live band, Opeth has loosened up over the years, with Åkerfeldt breaking out of his shell and communicating better with the crowd... Opeth is arguably at the top of their game right now, and their live show is one of the reasons for that.

Opeth's US trek with Enslaved concludes in DC tonight (5/27). More pics from Grand Ballroom, and Opeth tour dates, below....

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photos by J Caldwell

Tickets are on sale at noon for the May 13th Animal Collective show at Terminal 5 in NYC. The date is part of a much larger tour.

Animal Collective played Grand Ballroom in NYC on Tuesday night. Grab a live recording of the show HERE. They played Bowery Ballroom one night later. Grab the live recording from that show HERE.

Since our last Bowery post, J Caldwell wrote in with some more pictures of the show. More of them below...

Continue reading "Animal Collective Terminal 5 TIX, Bowery pics & recordings"

photos by Zach Dilgard, words by Nick Masi

Dave Portner: There have definitely been other times when we want people to understand we're just normal guys. We're not these weirdoes that a lot of people pin us down as trying to be. It's been, in that way, important for us to talk to our fans and meet people. That takes away from the mystery, I guess. But it's important to have an understanding when you feel like you're stepping over the boundaries that we've set. I think there are still certain things about our records, or the music-making process, that we really don't care for people to know. Like, certain technical things. We're not so into having photos of us taken in a studio, or anybody coming when we're working in the studio, because there's a side of it that's really personal to us and just between us. [a recent Pitchfork interview]

Animal Collective celebrated the release of their highly-acclaimed new album Merriweather Post Pavilion with a show at Grand Ballroom last night (1/20/09). It was their first of two smaller NYC shows. The second is today at Bowery Ballroom. Then they're back to play the much larger Terminal 5 in May.

Tickets for the sold out show were in demand, but the general admission room wasn't uncomfortably packed. The crowd was young. It was an early night - I was back on the street before 11PM.

After an opening set by Blues Control, Animal Collective kicked the set off with MPP's opening track "In the Flowers," and from there they played a nice mixture of songs - old and new. The crowd went nuts for "My Girls," "Brother Sport" and the now classic "Fireworks." The setlist didn't include all of MPP (no "Bluish" "Taste," "Also Frightened", or "No More Runnin"). Maybe they'll finish it off on night two. The show could have been louder, but that got better by the end, most noticeably during a a crazy version of the bass-heavy, show-closing, "Slippi". All in all I wasn't disappointed, but they left the door open for tonight to be even better.

More pictures below...

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The Sigur Ros presale commenced this morning around 9am. The usual headaches were incurred. Don't worry though, the regular on-sale is still to come.

Sigur Ros didn't play a second encore at the Grand Ballroom show the other day, but they did answer everyone's wild applause by coming back on stage for multiple bows. More pics from that segment of the show below...

Continue reading "Sigur Ros tickets & pics of them bowing @ Grand Ballroom "