The Duke Spirit @ Ottobar 8/4
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First off…The Duke Spirit completely rock live, but I advise seeing them in a small venue because it came off a lot better than when I caught them at Coachella couple years ago, not that they were bad, its just seeing the beautiful and electric Leila Moss 5 feet in front of you will have you mesmerized all night. The music itself is nothing completely groundbreaking, very straight up driving rock songs that build to a frenzy then drop off. The Ottobar sound was better than usual but some of the guitar hooks that make the songs distinguishable from one another were a little washed out, because listening to the album after the show it sounds a lot different live. Other than this, the Duke Spirit slaughtered their way through an energetic set of bluesy/punky/grungy rock-n-roll (yes, all of that).
Leila Moss is the star of the show in this band, not to say her bandmates aren’t any good, because they are, but its hard not to take your eyes off someone who jumps and crawls her way around the stage, constantly offering up new mic-stand poses, kicking her long spandex covered legs out, and raising her hands to the ceiling like she is praying to some god of rock n ‘ roll ( which is, of course, THE DEVIL! muhahaha). Her voice is deep and she can really release some power from those lungs, she’s like a rock Bjork mixed with duffy mixed with cheetara from the thundercats… ok maybe not that, but she definitely is part tiger.
The band looked like they had fun all night long. They began the show with “Send a Little Love Token” which I don’t really remember much because I was too mesmerized by the singer. Then “Lassoo” kicked in and you could feel the crowd start to go crazy. Once they got to “The Step and the Walk”, all hell broke loose, the band really got moving and played the song into a dizzying frenzy. The band was consistently giving it their all throughout the set, it was all based on how much they put into the song, because overall a lot of their music sounds the same, not necessarily in a bad way, but more in a way like every punk song sounds the same.. it’s more about the energy than the song structure. So when a slow song hit I was worried that it might just bring things down too much, but ” Sunken Treasure” is a great song, kind of reminiscent of a more ballady “Maps”. From then on it was one song after another of unreserved vigor that brought an unexpected surprise to a normal monday night in bmore. So, in the end we came away from this show quite surprised. We didn’t expect the Duke Spirit to completely fail, but we didn’t expect them to give us a rock colonoscopy either (not sure what that means, but ewww).
The Duke Spirit – The Step and the Walk
You can also listen to the Duke Spirit play live on WXPN via NPR here.
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Tags: Uncategorized , live , review , the duke spirit
Very upset at myself for missing this one. I saw them a few years ago open for Ted Leo and they killed it live!
on August 6th, 2008 at 9:44 am