Our Concert Could Be Your Life | Bowery Ballroom, NYC | 5.22.11

Our Concert Could Be Your Life celebrated the 10th Anniversary of Michael Azzerad’s phenomenal book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. The show contained a nice mix of contemporary bands performing roughly 10 minute sets of material from each of the bands featured in the book. The show kicked off with members of the Dirty Projecters playing a solid set of Black Flag songs including “Rise Above” and “Gimme Gimme Gimme”. Next up was Delicate Steve who took the stage to perform as The Minutemen with a guest filled set including Tim Harrington of Les Savy Fav and Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth. Then Ted Leo covered Minor Threat on an empty stage to a pre-record tape reel, that may sound lame reading this, but it was fucking amazing as Ted performed each song with tons of energy and precision in an artful way.

Titus Andronicus had a raucous set of early Replacements tunes including “Kids Don’t Follow“, “Raised In The City” and “Treatment Bound”. St. Vincent came out and stole the show with her intense shredding while covering Steve Albini’s Big Black. Other notable performances were Dan Deacon embodying the madness that is The Butthole Surfers and Wye Oak tackling the massive fuzzed out riffs of Dinosaur Jr. Unfortunately, with this many bands playing there were some let downs including Tune-yards rendition of one Sonic Youth song (luckily Callers took the stage afterward to play 2 more, well) and Buke and Gass‘s tame Fugazi covers. I have nothing against playing the songs differently and making them your own but Buke and Gass was just completely underwhelming, though we captured some video of them so you can decide for yourself. Check out some photos and video footage below.

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