Miike Snow, Santiago de Chile, 9/28/10
I was nervous heading to the Miike Snow show last Tuesday. Not for my safety, nor for the audience’s ears, but for the band’s reception. Chile is not known for its indie/blog/college radio/whatever-friendly music scene. There is a dedicated group of electro kids who will show up for anyone playing music they can wild out to (1999 rap reference, whut), and there are a few blogs (including the prolific Super 45), but that scene is pretty small down in these parts.
Adding to my worries about the size of Miike Snow’s audience was the show’s 10pm start time. Nothing starts that early in Chile. On the weekends, dinner doesn’t start that early. The folklore about the start-late, end-at sunrise Chilean nightlife scene is that it’s a direct result of the curfew that were in place under the Pinochet dictatorship. People weren’t allowed in the streets between 9pm and 6am, so on a Friday or Saturday night, it was common to throw a house party that started at 9 and, rather than turn into a slumber party when people got tired, raged on until 6am. When Pinochet lost the 1989 election and turned over the Presidency in early 1990, so the story goes, Chileans kept their uber-late nightlife traditions intact. I can’t confirm the veracity of this story, but it’s generally accepted by younger Chileans as the reason everything starts so late. Between the small scene and the early start time, I was concerned that Miike Snow might end up playing in front of 50 kids in Providencia’s mid-sized Teatro Italia.
As I rounded the corner of the venue and saw a massive line stretching out the door, my fear abated. Upon finding my crew already in line, my friend Erin quipped “Hipster central… seriously, where are all these kids in everyday life? I can’t remember seeing anyone who looks like this in Santiago.” (I guess she hasn’t heard that hipsters don’t do anything during the day time. I’m working on a hipsters are vampires theory, but it’s not ready just yet.) Jokes aside, it was oddly comforting to see a sea of plaid and skinny jeans. If only for a night, I was back home, going to see a show with a crowd that I might not necessarily like, but of which I do possess a deep understanding. (You’re right, I didn’t really set my jokes aside there.) The venue was quite full. Even before the band took the stage, some 400 people milled around dancing to Hercules and Love Affair and The xx blaring over the PA.
I’d never seen Miike Snow in concert before. My expectations weren’t wildly high, but I was hoping to have a good time. They are a band whose music I enjoy but don’t know particularly well.
For acts that count on electronic instrumentation as an integral part of their sound, as I see it, there are two challenges that they face:
- To use enough of a mix of traditional instrumentation that it seems like a performance (for examples of this done well, see: M83 and Battles).
- To keep energy at a level that if the crowd isn’t necessarily buying the “live-ness” of the performance that they’re still enjoying themselves (Girl Talk is probably the most apt, if controversial, example here… Etienne de Crecy also does a nice job of this).
Miike Snow has nailed the transition from two-person production team and vocalist in the studio to live six piece band perfectly. Lead singer Andrew Wyatt switches between upright piano and guitar. One of Bloodshy & Avant switches between a sequencer and keyboard set up and the upright piano, the other mans an eclectic drum machine-MIDI controller-cymbal table (sorry I don’t know which is which). All three primary members sing. Backing them up is a full drum kit, a bassist and keyboardist.
What results is a mountain of sound that bowled over a relatively mellow pre-show crowd into a full-on dance party. Even toward the back of the room, people cut it up. The band’s light show, smoke machine and giant on-stage Jackalope instilled a certain attitude into the audience. The band was going to have fun tonight and they were going to bring us along for the ride. The relatively slow, piano backed “Silvia” turned into a raucous, MIDI and hand-clap driven zoo on the dancefloor. Wyatt played with the vocals on “Rabbit” and hammed to the crowd a bit, butchering a few phrases in Spanish to their delight. The high-point came, as it always should, with the band’s closing number of “Animal.” All told, they played about 75 minutes, cut short after Wyatt took a hard fall on stage. I only wish they could have played more.
(I hate to dash another band, particularly not one that has nothing to do with Miike Snow, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that in my notebook I wrote, “This is what Animal Collective should look like live.” I know they play very different styles of music, but that was just my initial gut reaction after a few songs and seeing how well Miike Snow had integrated live instrumentation into their show.)
I can’t recommend a Miike Snow live show more strongly. Go see them over the next two weeks as they tour the US.
Miike Snow - Animal
