Penguin Prison
Last night I had a chance to watch Penguin Prison’s first live show before a sold out crowd of about 250 at Mercury Lounge. I was tipped off to them a couple days earlier by Lord B, and while excited to see them, given the high pop production and the fact that it was their first live show I had admittedly limited expectations for what I would see. There were only a couple of songs that I could find online and I felt “The Worse It Gets” stood out. It had One-Hit-Williamsburg-Indie-Wonder written all over it.
Watching the front man Chris Glover a.k.a. Penguin Prison who writes and records all the records was an interesting sight. He was clearly nervous, extremely serious and very intense. He had assembled a band for this show which constituted of a bass player, a drummer, a synth man, and Glover on guitar. They also backed themselves up with a laptop on Garage Band which had a nice effect of augmenting the sounds.
When he started playing, the nervousness seemed to fade and a highly talented, Type A musician began to kill it. Opening with “Animal Animal,” Penguin Prison brought a song that felt a little flat to me in the recording to life with excellent vocals and a great guitar solo (Why doesn’t anyone do guitar solos anymore?).
I have literally been driving myself crazy today trying to find the songs “Don’t Fuck with My Money” and “Multi-Millionaire,” which I had never heard before, and think might be better than “The Worse It Gets.” Penguin Prison, if you are reading this, please email us the MP3’s, we promise we won’t put them up or share them (unless you want us to)!
Penguin Prison, you have completely won us over, you killed it last night, please play NYC again soon and keep writing more songs.
Das Racist
As for the opener, Das Racist. Where to begin? It was like you took all the guys that lived in the house together in Knocked Up, gave them an eight-ball of heroin, took away their sense of humor and told them they should start a rap group. They were really sloppy and the performance was definitely not helped by whatever substance everyone was on. C’mon guys, think about the bands in the 70’s and 80’s that did drugs, they were still really good, you need all the help you can get so I recommend staying in reality next show.
Yuppie Dance Party 