Office @ Harper’s Ferry
October 8th, 2007 - by Eddie
Office may be my new favorite band and it’s not because of the catchy, indie pop/electronic dance grooves. It’s because they have a smoking hot girl in the band who plays keyboards and a cowbell. I dunno about you, but any band that employs a cowbell is already awesome. When you have a SHG slam on it, all the better.
It was Sunday night (10.07.07) and it was hard to get out to a show, mostly because I had spent most of the day glued to the television watching football in my pajamas.
But for the sake of live music, and the good folks at 52 shows, I sucked it up and dragged my sorry ass into the shower and out on the road.
There was an opening band, local favorites Cassavettes who use an extra “t” in their name so as to not get confused with “Cassavetes,” an indie rock band from Georgia. I would pay good money to see both these bands battle it out (either musically or physically) to see who gets to keep the name and who will be forced to change it to “Cassa de la Vettes.”
Anyway, I was surprised. Cassavettes put on a decent set and were pretty comfortable on stage, so much so that the bass player found it necessary to mental transport to the ‘90s and began head-banging on stage. I wasn’t sure if he was just born too late or an ironic genius. Either one would have been fine.
(Random: Whenever Dave, the other guy with 52shows, saw a guy at college who looked small and thin with a large head, we deemed him Bashettti. It meant we wanted to pound the shit out of this person, for no good reason. This is how I felt about the guitarist.)
The crowd was really into (I’m assuming they were all friends with the band) and it allowed band members to leave the stage and roam about the crowd, being more epic than a local band should be. And maybe they aren’t just a local band. They keep this up, they could go places.
Which brings us to the Office, the group you may remember from the song “Wound Up,” which I think was downloaded like three million times or something. I was recently sent the band’s “new” album titled “A Night at the Ritz.” I say “new” because the album really only has two new songs. The rest are remixed versions of previous songs.
So it’s tough to get excited over that…until you see Jessica Gonyea hit the stage in a tan dress and knee-high boots who extends her lips out when she sings words like “you” or “beautiful.” For a brief moment in time, I was ready to leave my girlfriend and chase after an indie-rock dream with long, brown curly hair.
Oh yea, the music was good too.
I’ll say this about the Office. They were a lot more interesting live than on their album. “A Night at the Ritz” sounded like they were a group of pretentious rockers singing about the going out, strange hook ups and rotten relationships. And, to an extent, they are that. But presentation counts and though their crowd was inexplicably smaller than that of Cassavettes, they put on a great show regardless.
I’ll hopefully have video up soon. Till then enjoy the pics at our Flickr page and, if Office comes to your town, check them out. Especially if you dig a cowbell and a SHC…
*Update: Below is the promised video of Office performing “Q&A” and my future Friendster contact Jessica Gonyea slamming the cowbell. Enjoy.
October 17th, 2007 at 11:18 am
They have another chick on bass, but for some reasons she’s not touring with them at the moment. She missed the show they played with Earlimart (in Chicago) about a week before this one as well. But she was with them when they opened for Fountains of Wayne in August.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
[...] Office: I’m still in love with the girl in the band who slams on the cowbell. [...]