At 7pm on the first night of Atoms For Peace’s London residency, the Amok Drawing Room has already sold out of commemorative mugs. The Enterprise pub across the road from the Roundhouse has been rebranded in expressionist monochrome, and an upstairs room has been upholstered in Stanley Donwood wallpaper, the better to sell exquisite £500 prints, t-shirts screenprinted while-you-wait, and a pointedly apocalyptic jigsaw puzzle.
We find ourselves in the wrong bar by mistake. Arriving at Hyde Park for this second London show on the Stones' 50 & Counting tour, we're issued with numerous coloured plastic wristbands that are intended to identify where we can travel around the site. There is this bar, that tier, this restaurant, these toilets... one of the first questions we're asked as we enter the site is whether we have a dinner reservation.
On their fine "Light Up Gold" album from the end of last year, Parquet Courts often come across like a kind of self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipster band, allbeit one who are, of course, a) disdainful of the term 'hipster'; b) focused on a rather old-fashioned hipster sound that, until they became hip, was probably too hip, or not hip enough, for hipsters; c) snarky about self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipsters; d) probably reflexively quite snarky about themselves.
One terrible absence from this week’s playlist is, of course, Bob Dylan’s “Tempest”, which Allan heard a while back. If you haven’t read his preview yet, please check it out here. Some fairly lively discussion in the comments thread, too.
