Nightclub Review |
The Ting Tings are like the greatest basement-party band ever. They're all about dancing and having fun, and isn't that what we all need right about now?
Tuesday night at a sold-out Chop Suey, they had everybody moving, everybody grooving, as they pounded out loud and vibrant dance-floor rhythms, like updated Blondie meshed with the B-52s, as imagined by LCD Soundsystem.
It was just the two Ting Tings on the red-curtain-draped Chop Suey stage — Katie White and Jules De Martino — but they created a big, multilayered, all-enveloping sound by way of drums, guitar and a wide variety of fascinating, electronic polyrhythms activated by a maze of foot pedals at White's feet.
De Martino, in short-cropped hair and dark shades, was on one side of the stage playing drums and contributing occasional vocals. Slim, hyperactive, dyed-blond White was on the other, handling the lead vocals, playing guitar and creating blips, bangs, dinks and cool electronic-keyboard sounds with all her sound gizmos.
A huge bass drum, almost as tall as White, took up a big part of the back of the stage, and you knew she was going to have at it at some point. And she did, taking a mallet to the monster during the taut, tension-filled "Shut Up and Let Me Go" (a song you might remember from a popular iPod commercial).
The crowd really got into the intense, swirling maelstrom of the defiant "That's Not My Name," vocalizing the echo part of the recording, " 'ame, 'ame, 'ame." They danced like crazy to the irresistibly catchy "Great DJ," laughed and smiled at the smart-mouth "Keep Your Head" and caught their breath during the relatively tame "Traffic Light," featuring White's jazziest vocal.
She complimented the delighted crowd, calling it "very similar to a U.K. audience." As the duo is from one of England's great music cities, Manchester, that was high praise, indeed.
The entire set consisted of about a half-dozen extended songs, most of them from the Ting Tings' debut American album, "We Started Nothing," released last week. The one disappointment about the show was that they didn't play all 10 songs from the CD, and more.
Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312 or pmacdonald@seattletimes.com
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