A Sunny Day in Glasgow

I was taking leak at the Bell House last night when these two dudes started talking:

"Maybe we should pull some Axl Rose shit and go on way late."

"Or just say that there is no apple juice backstage and not go on at all."

They were clearly fucking around, I guessed they were from Sunny Day in Glasgow and we started talking a bit. I asked what the deal was with their name and apparently a few of them went to art school in Glasgow. I said my band has a song called "A Sunny Day in Portugal" and one of them (the tall bassist) said "We'll see you in court!!" Haha, but I told them it was kind of an ode to Panda Bear, and they said they're going to be sharing a bill with him Spain soon.

A buddy of mine might be doing some work for the Bell House so he got me and him comped for a few shows this week. Last night was SDinG, tonight is Califone, Thursday night is the Walkmen.

SDinG were really cool, actually even better than I expected and I like both their records. They have two chick singers, one of whom is this Asian chick who bounces around in a loose 50s style skirt and white keds; I kind of wanted to start dancing with her, she was fun. The other chick was cool too, also in a 50s skirt, and she played keyboards as well. In general I felt there was a pretty big gulf between their recordings and their live peformance. I guess that isn't all that uncommon but I had the feeling that they haven't been recorded right. They rock a lot harder than what you get on the recordings, which are fairly washed out and dreamy, cool but a little bit amorphous and maybe too vague. Live there is still a cool ambient thing happening but the girls' vocals work better together. The biggest difference to me was the drums; the drummer is pretty slamming but the records have way too much reverb/echo going on and that vitality is lost.

Anyway, the Bell House is cool because most of the bands that play there are pretty well-known but they just hang out afterwards, so I managed to semi-drunkenly share my opinion about their recording/live divide with a bunch of different band members. I'm sure that they will think deeply about my beer-soaked ramblings, in particular the keyboardist/singer, who was working their merch table ("LPs sold out"!) who seemed impressed that I was wearing a suit.