Tue 9/3 @ 8:30PM
Supposedly, electronic dance music (EDM) is the new rock and roll — but then we’ve been hearing that for 20 years. In fact, it’s not a hot new youth trend; it’s pretty much been absorbed in the mainstream and in many cases merged with rock and pop.
And new stars are rising to join the old names.
Among them is Seattle’s Robert DeLong (now based in Los Angeles) who’s been creating a buzz in the electronic music community in the past year.
Like most such artists, he’s a one-man show, a singer, songwriter, and performer, who adds showmanship to the format of a guy up there singing to music that’s all contained on computers. And on his recently released album, Just Movement, he melds traditional songwriter’s attention to melody and meaningful lyrics.
As his press release states, he is “a one-man band who uses MIDI interfaces, a full drum set, guitar, drum pads, keyboards, laptops and game controllers, looping his music live to fuse electronic dance beats with striking melodies and lyrics with emotional heart.”
He says the album is a statement of his philosophy: “For me, when you strip away all the human moral elements of a person, you’re left with the fact everything is just moving, the whole universe is vibrating in different ways, moving around. Then the rest of the album is trying to figure out what to do with that and it’s kind of a play on words too.”
You can mull that over or just get up and dance when he plays the Grog Shop. New York’s Ghost Beach who play what they call “tropical grit pop,” and local band the Sleeps open.
Admission is $8 in advance, $10 day of show.