Edward Sharpe and Magnetic Zeros: 'High-energy love fest'
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Lauded Los Angeles folk-rock collective Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros brings its celebrated live show to Club Metronome in Burlington on Sunday. Submitted photo |
Toolbox
By TOM HUNTINGTON Arts Correspondent - Published: November 20, 2009
One of the most lauded indie bands around visits Vermont on Sunday, when the Los Angeles folk-rock collective Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros brings its celebratory, dance-inducing live show to Club Metronome in Burlington.
Judging by recent reviews of the group's current tour, the show should be one for the ages.
Case in point, the band's Tuesday show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City: "Energetic and uplifting, the songs shed an overwhelming joy over the sold out Bowery Ballroom," said a Wednesday article in the New York Press. "The normally motionless New York City crowd fell into a frenzy of dancing."
And this about the group's Halloween show at the Park Plaza Hotel in L.A., where the Zeros "turned the completely costumed capacity crowd into a transfixed mass of movement," according to LA Weekly.
Rolling Stone described the band's euphoric live shows as "more like shamanistic tent revivals than rock concerts," while the University of Georgia student paper called the group's Athens show at the 40 Watt Club "a high-energy love fest."
The 10-piece group is fronted by singer-songwriter and band mastermind Alex Ebert, a modern-day pied piper of hippie-fied folk-rock who made a name for himself as leader of the L.A. electro-dance band Ima Robot.
Ebert named his current band after a fictional character in a book he was writing "about a boy who transcended his dismal world by tapping into some sort of universal music," according to Rolling Stone.
The Zeros are touring in support of their debut album, "Up From Below," released in July. Called "a warm collection of loose and jangly songs that marries The Polyphonic Spree's ensemble glee with sing-along hooks," by A.V. Club (The Onion), the album was recorded live onto two-inch tape using an old 24-track analog tape machine from 1979.
Celebratory anthems abound, but the centerpiece is "Home," an insanely joyous and infectious love song featuring added vocals by singer (and Ebert's partner) Jade Castrinos.
"One of the more unusual musical acts to emerge from Los Angeles in some time," said the L.A. Times, "the band has become standard-bearers for the folk-rock revival."