Pictured: Ethan Hawke. A pretentious douchebag whose work is derivative of greater artists and also most likely a roadie for the Silversun Pickups.
I was in the gym several times over the past weeks, lifting weights as only I can, and on the flatscreens they would periodically play a music video from some band that I've never heard of called the Silversun Pickups. Now, it's probably important to tell you that they play music over what is actually on the flatscreens, thus negating the purpose of having flatscreens in the gym at all. If they want to show me an inspiring visual image while I get my lift on, I would rather they show my hypnotoad instead of MTVU. At least hypnotoad is likely to get me to sync my movements with his hypnotism so that I'll be working out with an optimal heart rate at a solid 130 beats per minute.
So, back to the Silversun Pickups. I was a little skeptical about their music for a number of reason. For starters, their bassist is a broad who looks like a young Allison Janney, and usually having a female musician in the band is a telltale sign that the music will blow. As far as I can remember, I have never rocked out to a female musician in any capacity, just as sure as I've never laughed at a joke of a single female comedian (I'm looking at you Margaret Cho, Ellen Degeneres, and Wande Sykes). The only band where I can even remotely remember this dynamic working is Sonic Youth, and that's mostly in spite of Kim Gordon, since Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo are so outstanding that their riffs often drown out the vocals to songs that Kim is trying to ruin. On the other hand, their video had what appeared to be hot models playing musical chairs, which I thought appeared sexy on the surface.
Well, it came as little surprise to me that when I finally listened to this video during a period of YouTubeage that it sucked hard.
Their lead singer sounds like Billy Corgan, only if he was to mainline even more estrogen. All of the male band members have stupid facial hair and lame hipster beards like Ethan Hawke in the picture up top. The sound of the band combined the shittiest parts of Sonic Youth, the Smashing Pumpkins, Nada Surf and a string of other 90's bands whose memory lead singer Brian Aubert has chosen to take a dump on. Throw in a few riffs that sound like the shittiest songs the Strokes played in their early years and you pretty much have this band pegged.
However, I couldn't shake the feeling that there is probably a core following of Hipster douchebags who think that this band is great and who yearn for a crappy Smashing Pumpkins tribute band. Thanks to the fine people at Amazon, I was able to confirm this hypothesis. I could almost imagine most of the reviewers sitting at their Mac Notebooks in a Starbucks in Brooklyn or Portland, taking time off of writing the screenplay that they've been working on for the last 3 years to push their Rivers Cuomo glasses further up their noses and hunker down to write a music review that is an exercise in pretension.
Woogie Boogie, Hipsters...Woogie Boogie.
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