where the wild things wander

The weekend in pictures, 5/15 at the Echo and 5/16 at UCSB’s Extravaganza…

Ponytail – Beg Waves (live Daytrotter Sesh)
The Cool Kids – Pump Up The Volume (Flosstradamus remix)
Usher ft. Lil’ Jay-Zeezer and Ludacris – Yeah In The Sun

Ponytail

Ponytails music invokes an inner child, lying somewhere between cathartic and chaotic, or if you wanted to relate it to the past, it’d be that point in time where you started to remember, the early part of todlerdom. Although there was a smaller than expected turn out, (Left to Right) Dustin Wong, Molly Siegel, and Ken Seeno brought an energetic presence to a captive audience – besides the one wasted dude in the audience who was almost as funny as he was annoying. They played two newer songs that seemed more like an organized trail over the bouldering ones that they created previously on Ice Cream Spiritual.

And one couldn’t forget the trail master, Jeremy Hyman tearing apart the drum set.

UCSB’s  Annual Extravaganza Where Were You?

Last year they brought in Saosin and Hellogoodbye to sub headline with Nas being the main attraction  – this year they got the Cool Kids, Cold War Kids, and Girl Talk to lead the way into Ludacris, it’s like day and night… (I suppose that was a pun, it being played and all) The one thing that went completely wrong was that the Cool Kids started off the day, leading into the less than ‘hyped as all hell energy’ of Cold War Kids. Though I can appreciate the Kids’ (Cold War that is) music, it was like someone opening the door during sex, briefly interrupting something incomparable – but hey, you can’t always get what you want.

We checked in on the Cool Kids last week at Audiotistic, this weekend they graced us with an interview (coming after a shitload of school work).

The Cold War Kids were good, nothing worth noting besides Hospital Beds, it’s a guilty pleasure of mine.

So then there was this guy named Gregg Gillis who came onstage in the appropriate sweat suit – ’nuff said.

And then everyone waited a shit long time for what they thought was going to be Ludacris, but turned out to be special guest Asher Roth, complete with Chuck Inglish’s blunt. Something seemed appropriate that a man getting famous for singing about the lesser beauties of college came to one of the colleges and tried to pass on his gangster whiteness to a classically stereotypical group of kids who had probably consumed more alcohol in the past two months than his colligative association could handle in a year. I think the best part of the set was the drummer who seriously killed it, I was amazed that he had a drummer along with his turntableist and Linsey Lohan accompaniment – while I didn’t paparazzi my ass a skeletal Lohan, though I did get a fairly good shot of ‘College’ himself.

And then came the Lud-meyer. Ludalicious. Lacadocious. Laughadiculous. Luda-thought you were an actor-cris. Ludacris. The novelty Ludacris I thought would show up never came, as he put on a much better show than I was anticipating. I mean I hadn’t heard a lot from the man in a while, but he seems to still have it.