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 Last night, on a steamy street in New York City’s Chinatown, a collection of barely legal girls wearing men’s shirts as dresses – Louis Vuitton status bags dangling off their birdlike arms – pouted and smoked Marlboro Reds outside a nondescript building. After stubbing out their cigarettes with the flat heels of their metallic sandals, they flashed foreign passports and were led inside a smoked-glass door. What is this place? High-end brothel? Harmony Korine film set? Secret late night casting for Gossip Girl? No! It’s the Virgins/Young Lords show at Andrew WK’s new rock club, the tragically named Santos Party House. Inside, the disco ball stayed mercifully still but a smoke machine worked overtime (barfy!) while men in an array of trendy hats (fedoras, porkpies and – barfy! -- cowboy) bought twelve-dollar whiskeys for the assembled young women. By the time the Young Lords took the stage there was a sense of jittery lust in the air, and if you like your men to look like homeless British hipsters from the mid-70s (or Kate Moss’ latest rocker lover) then you would have been pleased by what you saw onstage. They come across as a decent cover band jumping from Springsteen to the Stones, which is really great if you’re looking for ideas for an iPod playlist, but less great to stand around and listen to. The Virgins have more to offer. A New York quintet who borrowed the Strokes’ melodic punk and turned it into party music (hey, it’s more than the Strokes have done with it lately), they landed five songs on Gossip Girl before putting out a fairly fantastic debut album and quickly garnering a reputation for sucking live. Last night, the Virgins proved they’ve been working to correct this imbalance. After playing a lackluster, muddy opener, frontman Donald Cumming removed his black jacket, hitched up his Levis 501’s, took a swig of Budweiser, and demanded more vocals in his monitor. He was still occasionally comically and loudly off-key, but his geeky-cute running-in-place stage moves made it all seem endearing rather than embarrassing. Suddenly songs like “Hey Hey Girl,” “Private Affair” and “One Week of Danger” – which are such sleezy disco-decadent fun on record – were coming across that way live. The privileged teen audience reacted to the collision of youth, sex, booze, and serrated guitar sounds by making out with the nearest pair of available lips. Blair Waldorf would have been proud. |
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