The Hippodrome

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“We kind of hope that our music will somehow save the world.” Verbatim, this is the answer that Lee Pender of the New York based band Boy Crisis offered when asked why the band creates the music that they do. So what is our savior’s style? From what I can tell, it’s a charismatic mix of dance-inducing beats and flippantly sexual lyrics that doesn’t take itself too seriously. When Tal Rozen quips “you can do me up like Woodrow Wilson/ carry my children,” and “I wanna be your South Beach diet,” it’s evident that Boy Crisis is aiming to bring their listeners along for the ride.

BC’s quest to fill the world with love, sex, and dancing began in 2005 when Rozen, Alex Kestner, and Victor Vazquez began creating music together at Wesleyan University. A year later, the band was on the brink of breaking up due to their inability to play their creations live, when Pender joined as, “a Christmahanakwanza present to the world.” Since Pender’s arrival, Boy Crisis has been able to bring their sound to clubs across New York City, the ideal environment for their individual brand of dance rock.

BC draws on influences you might suspect, like Justin Timberlake and Michael Jackson, to bands a bit harder to hear in their sound, like Battles, Animal Collective, and Kylie Minogue. While these artists have impacted their lives from a distance, the boys of BC recognize the changes they’ve made on each other. “I think we influence each other musically and personally,” says Pender. With Kestner handling the production, Vazquez and Rozen writing lyrics, and Pender on “wiitar,” the band often finds themselves sitting around a computer throwing ideas back and forth until something good comes out of it. Pender added that, “the best stuff strikes us … but you notice you get struck less often when you don’t ever sit down with the intention to get struck.”

In any case, sex sells and BC sells sex in a wonderfully intoxicating way. It’s hard to do it justice on a recording, so if you’re in the Big Apple, get your butt to a show.

This entry was posted by Sarah Murrell on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Blurbs, Written By Sarah Murrell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.