kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye (2007)

The part of LA where I lived in the late 2000s was a really rich vein of just-breaking-through-“indie” music but then Daft Punk did that Coachella set and everyone sold their guitars and bought turntables.

This was the song coming out of there you’re most likely to recognize, “Silversun Pickups” was actually a reference to a liquor store at the cross of Sunset and Silver Lake.

Like, I kind of felt like a dilettante, but in retrospect going to Spaceland or The Echo at least once a week I was more exposed to that stuff than 99.9% of America.

Great Northern, The Like, and Giant Drag are the real standouts I remember. I saw The Submarines for a monthly Spaceland residency once and came back again the next week but they ended up about properly rated.

The monthly residencies were pretty much as big as you could get there, play once a week as a showcase for A&R reps or – really growing key at that point – people who might put it in commercials or CW shows (which for music somehow went through your publisher?)

Since I was livejournal, and maybe years before. It’s about Giant Drag! I might have even done them once on livejournal ha, ha.

So here’s the problem with all the witty things I had to say about Giant Drag: within 10 minutes of thinking them up, Annie Hardy, who is Giant Drag, wevs, and does great stage banter, made better jokes about them than I could.

I was like “wow, she’s a lot more waifish than I remember”, and she made jokes about having to watch her hipbones when she slung the guitar now.

I was like “wow, back in ‘05 she was kind of doing what everyone got to now even after that Coachella '06 Daft Punk show got everyone into DJing and then Best Coast/Wavves had to rescue them!” Also, wow that internet GIFlike background of strobing cats and inverted crosses and psychedelic backgrounds is kinda trendriding! And she was like “hey Echoplex kids, what live bands do you like?” and when the answers were Giant Drag/Giant Drag/Best Coast/Giant Drag she was like “oh, did I hear you say 'Better Coast’?”

I was like “oh huh she rides her old songs well” and she was like “I’m tired to fuck of playing these songs, this ends now”. Which I think she was faking, she’s good at faking. She did give an exegesis on Kevin Is Gay that maybe made sense if you followed band drama.

So Giant Drag is awesome and was awesome and should be awesome. It’s a shame they didn’t have a new album to buy, I look forward to that.

That Daft Punk show, and the death of Indie 103.1, really fucked up the local scene in a way it’s only now recovering from.