Dean and Britta at Southpaw on New Year's Eve

"Avenues All Lined With Trees"
Just cos I like being able to say, "I'm press, bitch," to doormen, I do some freelance work for BOMB magazine's blog which recently included covering the Dean & Britta show at Southpaw on NewYear's Eve. It was an early show, really chill, snagged a free limited edition print of the show's poster by Jenell Kesler. Read the review by my friend friend Lena, BOMB mastermind and party animalista extreme:

It would have been easy for Dean Wareham to rest on the laurels of his cult status and make a little extra money off reunion tours after the dissemination of Galaxie 500 and Luna, but—along with his bandmate and wife, Britta Phillips—he continues to produce new work and tour. In 2008 he released a memoir entitled Black Postcards; 2009 saw the release of 13 Most Beautiful, a DVD of songs Dean and Britta composed for Andy Warhol’s screen tests; and (according to their MySpace) they’ll be touring Australia this Spring. The two indie veterans graced Southpaw for an early show with their dreamy tunes and near-perfect bone structures on New Year’s Eve.

Like good New Yorkers on December 31st, the crowd at Southpaw was pretty buzzed and enthusiastic by the time Dean & Britta came on stage in matching guitar straps and burst into “Malibu Love Nest” without any introduction. The band’s soothing, string-laden melodies didn’t seem like an obvious choice for party ready Brooklynites on a night reserved for debauchery, but the venue was packed nonetheless. The set list consisted of a generous dose of Luna songs thrown in with some D&B classics. The Dean & Britta songs are slightly slower and more instrumental than the lyrically dense Luna numbers, so the mixture of the two was a good balance. After the sweet duet “Singer Sing,” they kicked it up a notch with Luna’s “Chinatown,” which featured some awesome shredding by Dean. Britta took the mic next with a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” from 13 Most Beautiful. Things got rowdier as a group of girls behind me started dancing to “Bewitched” and fans tackled each other for free posters Dean tossed into the crowd. The band cracked open cans of Red Stripe and Dean talked to friends in the audience between songs, making us all feel like we were crammed into someone’s living room rather than standing elbow to elbow at a Park Slope bar. The show’s highlight was the encore: a cover of Joy Division’s “Ceremony,” made even more haunting by Dean’s strange, nasally drawl. Video below:

Video by Elise Oh.

(See whole review on da BOMBlog.)

UGH BLECH BLAH gross digi cam video footage. I'm SORRY, WORLD!! But I just HAD to do it. Watching them play Ian Curtis's "Ceremony" was just too fucking good not to record. I LOVE the Galaxie 500 version of this, and when I closed my eyes and listened to Dean Wareham crooning it at me from 4 feet away, it was like hearing it for the first time but in reality it was like the 9,000th cos rAjc9%mWe,90sdfjml)!@! FUCK I love that cover.

Really I was just supposed to take photos and be out by 10, off to a bunch of parties with plenty of time left to get drunk and stay out til 6am. Nice n easy. But I just got a new digi cam for Christmas and hadn't actually had time to learn how to use it yet. (This was it, and I have since traded it in for this.) Soooo my photos all came out kinda goofy and red. But here they are anyways!