Japandroids @ Siren

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I think there’s literally no better way to encapsulate Japandroids than with this quote from the band’s MySpace:

imagine GUNS N ROSES meets IGGY & THE STOOGES meets THE SONICS meets THE ROLLING STONES!!!! that’s the band we wish we were. we’re not though. not even close.

The band isn’t prying for some deeper meaning with its music or lyrics, or any of that. It’s fun, breezy music played by a pair of guys who must’ve never expected to get big. Makes sense, then, that singer/guitarist Brian King continually talked, seemingly awestruck, about how much room he had on stage during his set. He also told the growing crowd that if you took every person they’ve ever played for, ever, and packed them together, it would still be less than the amount watching them at the festival.

It was kind of cool to see two guys suddenly caught up in a growing wave of buzz, moving onto bigger and bigger things – bigger stages, bigger audiences – and still seem so genuinely surprised by it. But I digress. This is a music blog so I have to totally critique now.

I don’t know what exactly I expected from the band live – in the end, it’s just two guys smacking the shit out of their respective instruments. So we had a guitarist trying to make the most of the large stage, not content to stay still for extended periods of time, and a drummer who had no choice but to sit, smack, and sing. It wasn’t terribly exciting, and it’s hard to say if the band was tight considering the one stringed instrument was slathered with distortion. It was noisy, mostly. I have to give them credit for putting their all into it – and they did – but I can’t say the type of music they were playing did them any favors in a live setting.

Japandroids – “The Boys are Leaving Town” [MP3]

More photos after the jump.

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