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Garage won’t die – Metro US

Garage won’t die

Heavy Cream
Three women and one dude from Nashville play punk rock that sounds like it just awoke from 1970s hibernation. This is a good thing. It’s almost like the children of the Ramones and the Runaways were put through a “Brady Bunch”-style union.

Oh Land
There were a good many young men drawn to the Oh Land show for more than Danish artist and former ballerina Nanna Øland Fabricius’ catchy electro-pop. “I came because I’m in love with her,” one audience member mooned. But there’s plenty to love about Oh Land besides the packaging — armed with a keyboard and a drum machine built into a box covered in tiny lights and balloons, Fabricius danced around in what looked like a skirt around her shoulders, singing flawlessly crafted pop that will no doubt end up in a commercial about cereal someday. She’s a pluckier, more cheerful Bjork. Oh Land is going to be huge.

Slow Animal
If last week’s most-hyped band The Drums are any indication, poppy surf-rock is a style that’s going to be back for a while. Slow Animal — of Frankville, New Jersey — seconded that notion, with smooth double harmonies and taut beats, which the band describes as ‘garage fuzz pop.’ But as front man Alex Karaba says, “that’s just a nice way of saying lo-fi.”

Ty Segall
Ty Segall’s stage presence is so commanding that at one point in his performance when he stood still — his chest heaving after rocking out like a maniac — the crowd just watched silently and waited for him to fall into another fit. The music is straight-up garage rock, but from the type of garage that also houses a vintage convertible and golf clubs. Plus, Segall does a cool rock trick where he sends his plugged-in guitar for a bout of crowd-surfing. Maybe he thought ‘guitar solo’ meant sending the six-string out on its own.

Gringo Starr

Forget the associations that immediately come to mind with the band’s name, Gringo Starr produce harder, darker psychedelic rock than The Doors were able to produce in their time. Playing under the seaweed of LED light strands at the Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg, the band cranked out heavy, Brit pop-inspired head-bangers and mesmerized the audience.

Morning Teleportation
A band of new-wave hippies that describe themselves as ‘a futuristic hootenanny,’ rockers of Morning Teleportation of Portland, Ore., can swagger like Franz Ferdinand and even manage to use a Peter Frampton-style voice effect box without any sense of irony. Frontmen Tiger Merritt and Travis Goodwin may look like the Hanson Brothers’ wayward bizarro twins, but they can bring the house down with their sing-along friendly riffs. When asked where the band wants to end up, Merritt responded without hesitating: “On a good porch somewhere and kicking it back with a dog and a cat, listening to Plastic Phantom.”

Snowden
Though this Atlanta band isn’t new to the party, having released a full-length, “Anti-Anti” in 2006, Snowden had all the enthusiasm of energetic upstarts. While they re-created some of their catchiest numbers that markedly recall Interpol and TV on the Radio, their new songs like “Anemone Arms” are seductively pretty. With not-hard-on-the-eyes frontman Jordan Jeffares’ hushed crooning over what is undeniably make-out music, it looks like we have the Gavin Rossdale of the ’10s on our hands.