Musically, our culture has achieved singularity. Every song ever recorded is dripping off the tip of the Internet’s long tail and into the ears of anyone with headphones and an iTunes account. Bands like the Black Lips and Interpol do solid service to sounds past, and Girl Talk mashes old songs together to make something new. While New York’s Francis and the Lights has one foot rooted solidly in Prince’s synth-heavy ’80s output, the other foot is rhythmically shimmying its way straight into the future.

I’ve mentioned them here before, several times, with good reason. They’re one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen, in New York or anywhere else.

This video for “The Top,” from the new mini-album “A Modern Promise” just made me scream. It’s shot on 35mm, pops in a giant new Quicktime window. Compared to Youtube videos, this is Batman in IMAX, except funky. Click the dancing Francis after the jump to see for yourself:
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Francis and the Lights remain my favorite Brooklyn band, Francis’ video-game etiquette aside.

They’re playing a show at the Bowery Ballroom in late June, and I HIGHLY recommend y’all go check them out. Here’s the info”

Francis and the Lights
at the Bowery Ballroom
Wednesday, June 25th
$12 in advance, $14 at the door
with ‘Heloise and the Savoir Faire’

Here’s a new-ish video clip from an in-studio performance, just for a taste:

“For Days” from Francis and the Lights on Vimeo.

Brooklyn’s Francis and the Lights (free EP here) will be rocking their nervous relaxing jams at the Mercury Lounge this Saturday, January 26th with The Giraffes, Baby Dayliner and others.

They’re hands-down my favorite New York band of late — as mentioned on an earlier post:

They’re the musical equivalent of doing coke and drinking Fresca on the back of a yacht while wearing a white linen jacket.

The rhythm section is tight like the L train on a Monday morning, both drummers locked into each other perfectly with no room for error and every beat in the exact right place. Spare dual keyboards flow over and through the silky rhythms like robot bees flying over plastic flowers, and the singer’s high voice and ostentatious dance moves — delivered with occasional popped collar or shirtlessness — perfectly interact with the music to create something that is both self-consciously retro and very, very heartfelt.

It’s true, too. Their live show’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, a jittery and confident mashup of James Brown and something from beyond the Phantom Zone. I saw the show in the video below, and it was way better than it seems here on Youtube … go on out Saturday and see ‘em for yourself if you can.

You think you know what’s right and what’s wrong, think you got it all figured out when it comes to video game etiquette and music and style, and then one night winds everything up like a tangled nest of clock springs and throws all your tools right off the bench.

I was teaching some friends the finer points of Big Buck Hunter II at the East River on Saturday night. The bar was packed and the game was old and fast, blurry deer rocketing around the screen which would’ve been hard enough except we’d been impairing our hand-eye coordination around the corner for a few hours, too.

You’ve got to stand back a bit from the machine just to give it a fair go, and it was right as I was trying to explain that the bucks usually hide behind the does and sometimes you’ve gotta give a blast into the air to get things moving that this dude tried to walk between the machine and the little neon plastic shotgun.

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