Miike Snow fans, now you know Jack
Kevin Bronson on
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Could’ve sworn I heard DJ Paul V spin a mash-up of the classic Inspiral Carpets songs “Two Worlds Collide” [Michel Gondry’s equally classic video here] leading in to Sunday evening’s twinbill of Miike Snow and Jack Penate at the Echoplex. In pairing Penate and Miike Snow, worlds didn’t collide, but they at least bumped hips.
- ||| Photos by Laurie Scavo
Penate, playing his first Los Angeles show, has an album called “Everything Is New,” which, of course, it isn’t. But it’s pretty good. His guitar-based dance-pop possesses an innocent, soulful edge (his backup singers were particularly spot-on Sunday), and it’s just ragged enough live that you want to “Be the One” when he sings it. He has buttoned-up good looks and an occasional Joaquin Phoenix/Matt Damon glare that gave his embrace-the-moment shouter “Let’s All Die” an appropriate immediacy.
Compared to Penate’s exuberance, the sheen from Miike Snow’s set was almost blinding. The band, the brainchild of songwriting-production trio Christian Karlsson, Pontus Winnberg and Andrew Wyatt, played in front of large silhouette of a jackalope, a reference to their single “Animal.” They started the set in masks, discarded them by the third song and nailed the songs from their self-titled album perfectly. It was a performance worthy of the members’ credits (Karlsson and Winnberg won a Grammy for Britney Spears’ “Toxic”), very slick and right in the wheelhouse of the KCRW-leaning crowd (not exactly rave kids, them). The swoonworthy “Silvia” nearly levitated the house.
As Sunday night dance parties go, you couldn’t ask for more.
||| Download: Jack Penate’s “Tonight’s Today”
||| Live: Miike Snow and Jack Penate perform Tuesday at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa and Wednesday at Spaceland.
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