East Coast Bands Get West Coast Love

East Coast Bands Get West Coast Love

Real Estate & Clap Your Hands experience Portland’s enthusiastic crowds

Real Estate (Brooklyn via New Jersey) and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! (Brooklyn via outer space) recently graced the stages of performance spaces on the West Coast. Judging by their responses – especially here in Portland – they got back what they gave. Smells Like Pop’s Cory X and I went to both shows, and left feeling an appreciation for our hometown fans’ refreshing attitude. (editor’s note: we are both veterans of live shows in other cities – Cory having caught acts in NYC, Minneapolis, as well as legendary Portland venues; I’ve caught numerous shows while living in LA, NYC and the SF Bay Area).

Alec Ounsworth (main Clap-per, pictured above) stated part way through CYHSY’s set at Portland’s Hawthorne Theater that he was under the weather and fighting something off – and that that situation could get worse, or turn into a type of “euphoria”; fortunately for us, he said it was heading toward the latter, and proceeded to provide an energetic set, that the crowd responded to with appreciation and some frenetic dancing, to boot. The show surged on an upward arch, as the band and crowd seem to feed off of each other – and, as Cory X noticed, this was made all the more remarkable considering it was a Monday night. New numbers received a polite welcome, while old favorites (primarily from their debut) were greeted like the new classics they are seemingly becoming.

Though the world seems to be experiencing bad economic news in regards to real estate, the band Real Estate seems to be bucking that trend. Their new record, Days, is getting positive press, and their music is being utilized to accompany everything from NPR programming to TV and movie soundtracks. The band’s music – Cory X pointed to clear influences ranging from The Shins to The Feelies – is cheerful enough to begin with, the band seemed particularly receptive to the crowd – a packed Doug Fir Lounge clearly engaged by the atmospheric-bordering-on-psychedelic pop being provided. The strength of the band’s new record made its material stand out, though they wrapped things up with an encore of “Fake Blues” from their debut, dedicated to “our friends Das Rascist”- the fellow NYC artists, who apparently were in the crowd. The band encouraged the audience to join them at their hotel room for a party, somehow able to generate energy on perhaps the toughest night of the year (Sunday, evening after daylight savings). I suspect some folks actually made it…

Gene Brunak

Mr. Brunak (as his students occasionally refer to him) is a high school Journalism/English teacher in Portland, Oregon. He subjects his wife, two kids and dog Duff (how nuclear!) to various forms of popular culture; they've expressed their appreciation by offering all the latest personal electronic devices as "gifts".

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