I Didn't Know Who Jupiter One Was, And They Kind Of Disappointed Me

By aemcdonald on Tue, Dec 11, 2007 7:23 pm

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Itching for something other than an unnecessary trip to Daisy Buchannan's (as I am not single) last Friday night, I perused a number of websites in search of a halfway decent show somewhere in the city. I'm sure you've all done this before- the venue website via google, the band's myspace page via the venue's website, the terrible music that streams, and then you're clicking a bunch of X's on the screen, frustrated as hell.

Well, I got halfway through this process and came across a band called Jupiter One playing at Great Scott, and they sounded... tolerable. I know "tolerable" is kind of harsh, but it's really the best word I could come up with to describe what I heard coming from my tiny Macintosh speakers.

Really bored out of my skull, I hiked from Central (where I live) all the way to Great Scott with my girlfriend. After a couple of Pabst, I was wondering what the hell was taking the band so long. We're all used to the logistical nightmare that is the sound check, but this was kind of strange. The main attraction that night was some DJ spinning brit pop and indie rock even I have never heard of, so I figured the show would be a "bang-bang" affair. Not so. The reason became apparent when the band broke into an acid nightmare a-la Jethro Tull. Yes, there was a flute, yes, there was a violin, and what was so devastating was that it was, on the whole, very typical. Someone near me suggested they had an element of Talking Heads, which they didn't, and someone else mentioned that they had a song on the Madden 07 soundtrack. This made more sense. At the end of the night, I was down about thirty bucks, I ended up drinking some "real" absinthe a friend of mine smuggled into the US from some godforsaken Balkan country, and the show wasn't that bad. The guys were talented, the instrumentation was interesting, but there was this undertone of new emo rock that's really in vogue right now, kind of killing the whole thing. I should have seen The Firey Furnaces there last night. Shit.