Manhattan’s sky-high rents drove many of New York’s musicians to Brooklyn years ago, making this the most likely borough to spawn the next band you care about.
But with expensive, slapped-together condominiums sprouting up like dandelions all over the place, it won’t be long until Brooklyn’s creative types migrate farther from Manhattan’s high-end job base. For now, you can still hear bands practicing inside of many of Brooklyn’s converted warehouses.
Witness The Unstoppable Death Machines, consisting of brothers Mike (guitar, vocals) and Bill Tucci (drums, vocals) and their brother from another mother Leaf Chang (bass, vocals). The band recently released a thousand CD copies of their first self-titled EP and handed one to me the other day. I’m happy to report that it’s good listening (MP3 below).
This band’s grimy, bouncy sound, which they create by playing "improvised-distorto-dance-psych-rock and then craft(ing) theirimprovisations into fully arranged pop-songs," contains at times hints of Interpol, Franz Ferdinand and The Fall, buttheir sonic identity is strong enough to avoid any real "sound-alike" criticism. They’ve got talent, drive, variety, weirdness, and enough of a popsensibility to tie the whole thing together.
Check them out; here’s the first song on the EP, "I Can Sing It All Night," which should probably be on the radio:
And here’s a video of The Unstoppable Death Machines covering Nirvana’s first single, itself a cover of Shocking Blue’s "Love Buzz," at the Yippie Museum in Greenwich Village (replete with footage of cops breaking up the show at the end of the video):
