SHOW UPDATE:

There are two must-see Bay Area shows this week that are still on sale and pretty cheap. Pogo (aka Nick Bertke), whose remixes of movies and TV shows made him a youtube celebrity (check out his remix of Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, or Up), has a show on Friday  at Slims in San Francisco for $20 including fees. It’s bound to be an interesting show, as I have heard he plays lots of tracks you can’t hear on youtube or anywhere else and they are all accompanied by their respective movie’s clips (it’s like better, live youtube!).

Buy tickets here: http://www.slimstickets.com/events/137869/POGO

On Saturday at Cal State University East Bay in Hayward, Matt and Kim are playing, along with Zion I (the show is called the PUKKA Indie Arts Festival). This show is only $9.99 and is still on sale. Zion I’s show on March 19^th at the Fillmore is sold out and Matt and Kim’s show at the Fox in June is $25! Ten dollars is definitely a deal.

Buy tickets here: http://csueastbaytickets.universitytickets.com/user_pages/event_listings.asp

Matt and Kim are a Brooklyn duo with a catchy indie dance punk sound. Zion I are an East Bay hip hop duo who play a lot of shows in and around Berkeley.

Also, tickets for the Railroad Revival Tour featuring Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and Old Crow Medicine Show go on sale to the general public tomorrow here: http://railroadrevivaltour.com/

Edward Sharpe put on an amazing live show–their onstage energy and chemistry is unrivaled. I can assume the other two bands will be equally fun to watch live. Tickets are $55, no service fees.

CONCERT REVIEW: CRYSTAL CASTLES, FRIDAY MARCH 4, THE WARFIELD, SAN FRANCISCO

Intense bass, electronic beeps, loud drums, ferocious screaming, brutal pit. Alice Glass is hoisted into the crowd and screams into her mic as everyone reaches forth to get a chance to touch her–yet all that most manage to do is squeeze together until the entire crowd becomes one sweating, pulsing, chaotic unity–no one is able to move without the consent of the collective whole. At times you forget to breath and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you have no control over your actions, pressed between the others in the space, jumping up and down without jumping at all–you are a slave to the crowd. If they fall to the right, you fall. If they push to the left, you have to push back to keep from falling.

And your body aches for days after… But is it worth it?

Crystal Castles are a Canadian electronic music duo that fuse a kind of punk aesthetic in their live show with electronic music. After all, vocalist Alice Glass was in a punk band before fellow bandmate and producer Ethan Kath saw her perform and got her to join his project. Crystal Castles sounds like your favorite 80s-early 90s video game soundtrack fused with dark bass lines and lyrics. They have released two LPs, both titled Crystal Castles, just to confuse both you and your iTunes. Some of their tracks are crude and violent in their delivery (“Doe Deer”) and feel as if they are purposely testing your breaking point, whereas other tracks are just plain electronic-dance anthems (take “Celestica” which was featured in a recent episode of Gossip Girl). With the hard-to-understand lyrics and intense instrumentation, each song embodies emotions–whether anger, longing, or hope–perfectly. You will also hear a very well-inspired use of vocal samples in tracks like “Vanished” and “Year of Silence” (that takes a couple lines from a Sigur Rós song and completely reinvents the emotions vocalist Jónsi brings forth in the original with his angelic singing). But don’t expect to hear the melodic vocal samples live.

Crystal Castles live show is like a punch to the face–and one to all other parts of your body. The raw emotion Alice brings with her stage presence and perpetual stage diving drives the crowd nuts–and that means a whole lot of pushing, pulling, falling, jumping, and loss of balance. At one point last night when Alice decided to grace the crowd with her presence, my face was literally jammed between two sweaty armpits of the people near me–unable to escape from my unfortunate position–as everyone reached out to touch Alice. Yes, the concert got a bit more than “claustrophobic” at times but wait, don’t get turned off from my description of the crowd–if you choose not to stand in the lowest pit area, you’ll be fine. In fact, after I left the pit during their final song, “Untrust Us,” I managed to find a spot just a bit father back whether I could dance to my heart’s content. And a Crystal Castles show is definitely one you can dance at. Though Alice Glass prefers to scream her lyrics–even those she doesn’t scream on the album versions of the songs–the music itself will send every inch of your body into dance mode. Yes, some of their songs like “Fainting Spells” and “I Am Made of Chalk” seem to be kind of intense on the album, and a lot more so live–the energy of the crowd rubs off on you (literally) and you are sent into a spiral of musical bliss (in some cases literally, depending on your sobriety). And it’s fun to watch from far away as Alice jumps into the crowd and everyone’s arms start reaching toward her as if she were some divine musical figure. She very well might be for the indie-electro scene. Not to mention that she stage-dived three times DESPITE HER BROKEN ANKLE.

At the start of the concert a roadie came on stage to tell us that Alice’s ankle was broken and the show would be canceled, only to laugh it off and call bluff. Of course, someone with as much energy and plain don’t-care attitude as Alice Glass will never cancel a show based on a mere broken ankle! After all, she has played shows with broken ribs before! Alice did have a crutch and used the mic stand for some support, and had a protective boot on–yet that didn’t phase her at all. I’ve seen Crystal Castles twice before and the only difference this time was that she maybe did not go into the crowd as much as before–yet she did, and we all know that no one else with a broken ankle would.

To answer the question I asked before–whether weathering the pit is worth it–the conclusion, of course, is yes. And, I apologize for the bad photo quality. I broke my policy of not taking photos at Crystal Castles concerts, and you can see why I had agreed on that before–you can’t steady you smart phone at all once the crowd starts dancing.

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