Well,

I haven’t really had much to update, so I haven’t. Which is to say:

I haven’t made much progress on my script. I’ve been watching lots of movies, but nothing particularly exciting. Work is fine - nothing to write home about, but I feel as though what I do is appreciated on some basic level.

So I’ll post about the Pipettes show I went to about a week ago.

Those of you who’ve seen my Myspace page know that under music I’ve got a big picture of The Shangri-Las. The 60s girl group sound is probably my favorite thing in popular music, and the recent wave of artists who take from that style either in part or wholecloth (The Pipettes, Amy Winehouse, El Perro del Mar) all take different tacts to the essential qualities of the sound. Where Winehouse mimics the Spector and Motown production sounds, and where El Perro del Mar gets at the essentially miserable, melodramatic quality of the sound, The Pipettes are perhaps the least faithful to the girl group sound. Mixing some sort of weird alien approximation of girl group harmonies (like Mary Weiss, Lesley Gore, and Ronnie Spector before them, none of these girls are particularly good singers) with a campy pro-sex post-feminist lyrical vibe and an on-stage show with costumes, dance-moves, and horribly ill-conceived banter, they aren’t really a girl group as much as they are an all-girl drag parody of girl groups, the wink-wink gesticulations a sort of mockery of the girlishness of girl groups past (never mind that the genre that brought us “Watch Out Sally” and “I’m Gonna Destroy That Boy” wasn’t always as ’safe’ as history might have us believe).

As I said, they can’t really sing, but they put on a good show. Particularly successful was their live rendition of their signature song “Pull Shapes,” which they ended the set with.

The real story of the show, however, was the opener, Atlanta’s The Booze:

As indicated by the above album cover, which cops The Rolling Stones’ 12×5, this band is completely and totally in love with the British Invasion. And they do a good job of melding the merseybeat sound with a bit of later mod and even Motown influences (their cover of “Heatwave” brings down the house). Their lead singer affects this sort of snarling nasal faux-cockney thing which works surprisingly well, and the overall look of the band is enormously winning - from the dude who basically models his entire life after early George Harrison to the singer, who has this sort of Truman Capote thing that, combined with his commanding vocal presence, makes for a surprising juxtaposition. This is a band to watch.

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