Music

Memoryhouse Tour Blog - Oxegen Music Festival

by AUX staff

Dear Internet,

This is Evan Abeele, lead singer, guitarist, of memoryhouse. The team and I recently flew out to Ireland to play Oxegen Festival, and Aux promised me my own reality TV show if I wrote about it. This was the first major festival that memoryhouse has been invited to play, so naturally we spent the majority of our time there at the buffet where we filled up on appletinis and salmon egg caviar because of course we did. Jenga was also a must.

Vampire Weekend were sitting beside us, so that’s neat, apparently they were at our performance too. Obviously we were at theirs:

Jay-Z’s set was my most anticipated performance of the festival, but a combination of really bad weather, and the fact that Jay Z’s 80-person deep entourage meant that there would be no exclusive side-stage viewing for us, though we did get to ride up to the stage with Jay’s accountant. Adrian also saw Beyonce. Why didn’t they perform ’03 Bonnie and Clyde? Lame! (Not lame).

Anyway! The big headliners for the day was the Arcade Fire, a little known band from Canada, kind of like us actually, except rather than being a broke ass band barely scraping by on whatever sad combination of internet-fueled groupthink and government-administered fluoride, they are the Arcade Fire, and they are awesome. We’ve seen the Arcade Fire before but we have never experienced Win Butler’s haircut so close. It’s very asymmetrical, like the songs on Funeral, where at any moment a lilting waltz can crescendo into something many twenty and thirty-somethings with emotional issues may describe to you (as they are serving your fancy iced coffee drink) as transcendent. Arcade Fire know how to play to the crowd, and an absolutely packed crowd (don’t let the BBC tell you otherwise) gleefully sang along to every word. As one can assume, the set was very Funeral heavy. They performed a healthy serving of their forthcoming record The Suburbs, and in spite of the crowd’s (at times) restless fidgeting (“do I know this song?” “Is this on that first EP of theirs?”) the new material sounded genuinely great.

I think that is all I can muster for this post. I guess I could talk about our set (it was nice!), but I’m running low on exaggerated punctuation and sardonic parentheses at this time, so I will leave it to your imagination. Besides, by getting in my requisite Jay-Z, Vampire Weekend, and Arcade Fire name-dropping, I’m going to own your Google alerts, and that is the first step.

Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z memoryhouse memoryhouse memoryhouse Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z JayZJay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z Jay-Z memoryhouse memoryhouse memoryhouse memoryhouse memoryhouse memoryhouse Arcade Fire Arcade Fire Arcade Fire Arcade Fire memoryhouse memoryhouse memoryhouse memoryhouse Arcade Fire Arcade Fire Arcade Fire mysteryhouse

LOVE,

Evan Abeele