It may have been St. Patrick's day, but 100 or so attendees at the midtown hotel's Great Room were content to bypass the Irish for three Swedes.
Peter, Bjorn and John chose this venue for the coming out party for their new album Living Thing, but also make their first appearance on these shores for more than a year. I confess I hadn't heard the entire show (the watermarked-advanced-copy machinery broke down in that regard), but their tight production talents were necessarily on display for the glammed-up hotel crowd, and brought some New Yorkie friends onstage to play "Young Folks" for the first time in a long, long time. They did the whistling themselves.
I watched half the show at a corner table next to actress Parker Posey, who remarked "Where's all the dancing? I though this would be more of a dirty downtown scene."
Well, Parker, the luxury hotel setting may indeed be a little more staid than your average downtown partyer is used to, but don't you think the free vodka appletinis and hors d'oeuvres more than made up for it?
Earlier in the evening, I sat down to talk to Bjorn Yttling and John Eriksson (Peter Moren, who recently released a solo album was elsewhere indisposed), and was delighted to find that they're as curious and whimsical in person as they are on their records, complete with onomatopoeic representations of the stripped-down beats they'd like to use on their next recors (Unfortunately my recorder was out of batteries, so I'm going to have to try to recreate that from memory. Ahem: ch-ch-ch-ch-boom-k-ch-ch-ch-ch-ah-ah-boom-boom.)
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