Événement

Free Energy

Returning to Gild Hall with memories of their full tilt 2011 show still resounding, Free Energy is back in Arden with a new album, called Love Sign, just named Stereogum's album of the week. With the new disc getting strong airplay on WXPN, be sure to get your tickets now!

From Stereogum this week: "Here's what I love about Free Energy, and what might be making things difficult for them commercially: They make rock music that functions as dance music. Weird to think now, but that used to be one of the main points of the music. These days, rock music is music for playing in the background while you're on the internet, or for driving fast, or for contemplating late capitalism's slow encroachment on our shared imagination. It's not made for dancing. And when it is, when rock bands play around with the idea of moving bodies, they're importing their dance-music stuff from other genres: House music thumps, disco drama-dynamics, Afrobeat ripple-into-infinity rhythms. But Free Energy are all riffs and claps and oohs and guitar-solo wheedles. It's all rock music, all descended directly from T. Rex or the Cars or Bachman-Turner Overdrive or Thin Lizzy or Tom Petty when he's at his sauciest. And all those ingredients are put in the service of momentum, of shimmy. The hooks don't exist to help us understand the ideas the band wants to express; they exist to be hooks. Maybe that seems frivolous or silly or even gimmicky; the band might be marginalizing themselves by projecting images as shop-class stoners from '80s comedies. But I find something almost moving in their dogged pursuit of the pleasure principle. They're making deliriously fun rock music in an era when that's apparently just not what people want, and there's something beautifully quixotic about that."

On their last two albums, released under the lawsuit-inviting name Reading Rainbow, the Philadelphia band Bleeding Rainbow bashed out catchy, lo-fi garage-pop. But the new LP Yeah Right, the first recorded under their new name, is more fleshed-out and expansive, pushing the band's harmonies over bleary fuzz-jams that remind me a bit of the Jesus And Mary Chain. I really like it. - Stereogum