Asteroids Galaxy Tour expressed as mathematical equation would be Dutch Pop + Stax Records – Blackness + psychedelic freak out = Asteroids Galaxy Tour. AGT as you hear it on the tracks is made up of multi-instrumentalist Lars Iversen working with vocalist Mette Lindberg to create fairly uniquer pop music.
Their sound is pop with a veneer of soul and funk instrumentation with lazy psychedlica arrangements working to provide a bit of a counterpoint to the “pure” Crossover Soul styles of recent female vocalists such as Duffy or Amy Winehouse. The counter point exists not just with the instrumentation, as one of the immediate things you’ll notice is Lindberg’s distinctive voice. Rather than emulating the smoky smooth delivery of the aforementioned vocalists, she pushes her voice into the higher registers of a teenaged singer but she does so with a very steady strength and confidence that prevents her technique from ever becoming nails on chalkboard distracting.
Though AGT has only been around for a few years, they’ve already managed to gain some accolades and exposure from other artists such as the aforementioned Winehouse but also Katy Perry. While also gained the modern day “mainstream indie cool” exposure through the use of a song in an Apple IPod commercial. So on record, they’ve got a great unique pastiche of other older sounds, how do they sound live? I went to Bowery Ballroom on the eve of their SXSW shows to check them out.
The opening act was Brooklyn’s Apache Beat, a band that’s been blowing up with open slots for a number of international acts while, tours in America and Europe and also being included in the top 40 of NY Magazine’s infamous “Brooklyn Music” issue. I hadn’t caught them live before yet knew them from their reputation so I checked out their MySpace page to get an idea of what I was in for. The music they’ve made available online is not horrible, but it’s really not representative of what I saw or heard last night.
The five of them take to the stage, fashionable, but not over dressed, the lead singer starts a little nervous, but within moments of the music, that’s gone. She ceases to be Ilirjanathe person and becomes Ilirjana, the Singer and she pitches herself forward with the music. The music veers wildly from factory dispensed NY Indie to pieces which culminate in noise and screams and wails of instruments no longer being played but attacked. Emotional catharsis found more typically in extreme music that caught me totally off guard. I went back to their MySpace page to re-listen to the music offered again, and came away disappointed. Where is this emotional intensity? Where is the passion and energy displayed last night? See Apache Beat live but skip the recorded output for now.
Asteroids Galaxy Tour come out and it was pretty much what you would expect. As the other musicians took to their positions, Lindberg came onstage in a gold lame dress kind of thing that caught every light on stage and every flash from the audience and threw it in every direction. The arrangements were near perfect replications of the album, even the elements which I would thought lost such as the swelling strings found themselves nicely included as the lush production work was translated to the live show. The tenor sax and trumpet were played strong without overwhelming the bassist or occasional guitar. The set list included a good chunk of their debut album Fruit, going for the high energy tracks that had a great deal of the audience grinning madly and dancing to the steady thump rhythms
There wasn’t a lot of banter from the band beyond the ‘how are you doing tonight’ pleasantries, but each admonition that the audience was not keeping up were met with cries as the band’s style of discoid funk in the style of a lost Casablanca Records release drove the audience on. Mercifully, they played one slow song before vanishing from the stage, only come back out and tear through one more dance song before we were emptied into the temperate night.