Saturday, June 15, 2013, 6:00 PM
SummerStage
Central Park, New York, NY
FREE!
Hailing from St. Albans, and originating in 1961, The Zombies are a legendary English Rock band. Led by Rod Argent on piano and Colin Blunstone on vocals, the band scored US hits in the mid and late 1960s with “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season.” Their 1968 album, Odessey and Oracle is ranked 80th on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” In 2011, The Zombies released their fifth studio album, Breathe Out, Breathe In. This latest album enhances the legacy of this monumental rock group with The Independent declaring, “…an authentic 1960s prog-pop tone is sustained through Argent’s surging organ and sly piano, combined with the layered harmonies of Blunstone, whose voice seems impressively unravaged by time.”
Coming together in 2009, Django Django is a British group that met at art school in Scotland and has its roots planted in London, England. This adventurous Rock group melds indescribable electronic flourishes to live instrumentation. Consisting of four members, Django Django’s debut self-titled album, has been voted by Rolling Stone Magazine as 26th in its “50 Best Albums of 2012” list. Each track contains its own nation of harmonies, rhythms and textures. Django Django’s story looks set to be a long and compelling one. By banging together their thirst for adventure and their exacting high standards, they’ve produced an album that seems to have everything, but on which everything never seems too much.
Just one listen to Adam Green & Binki Shapiro is enough to become enchanted. With deceptively pretty arrangements that echo the emotions of late-sixties Folk-Pop and an easygoing rapport between singers, this duet’s collaboration may seem like the perfect accompaniment to a sunny summer’s day, Southern-California style. But it works even better as a comforting soundtrack at the end of a dark, lonely night in the big city. The atmosphere the pair conjures up with strummed guitars and discreet layers of synths indeed suggests romantic possibility, but the lyrics are more sweetly melancholic, gently but candidly addressing betrayal, incipient heartbreak, and conjugal discord. It’s an approach that makes for compelling repeated listening, as the intimate dramas reveal themselves, and it’s one that surprised even Green and Shapiro as their self-titled debut album went on sale in January 2013.
A New Yorker by birth and Albanian by roots, deejay Modest P is best known for his long time Saturday night residency at the legendary East Village club Nublu. He is also known for being one of the founders of the seminal Easy Lover loft party and the now defunct Water Taxi Beach party in Long Island City, sharing the decks with world class DJs such as Carl Craig, Grandmaster Flash, Prins Thomas, and many more. He has performed at many venues in NYC and around the world. Modest P, or Petrit Pula as he is known by his real name also heads the Nublu record label.(SummerStage)