ANn ominous death knell has been the only sound most music industry A&R men have heard since the internet was first embraced by a mass audience in 1996.
Listening and buying habits have migrated from flipping through Monday’s new releases in your local record shop to online streaming via Spotify, and labels large and small have found themselves forced into a painful reassessment of an outdated business model.
So far the solution (despite recent Beachdown and Loop news) has been to try to reclaim lost revenue from record sales by placing more emphasis on live shows with larger, more extensive tours.
And for that you need bands who know how to entertain. So when Columbia record execs saw electro-pop outfit Passion Pit late in 2008 playing the songs which formed debut EP, Chunk Of Change – a five-track Valentine’s Day gift lead singer Michael Angelakos had originally written for his girlfriend – they snapped them up.
The band, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, were one of the so-called “blog buzz bands”, a phenomenon once deemed the most liberating force within the music industry allowing real-life music fans to champion the best new talent out there. They were named as one of the sounds of 2009 by the BBC before they’d even visited these shores.
It’s no surprise then Columbia have high hopes and there is a real buzz surrounding the upcoming UK dates to promote full-length début, Manners – especially after the band wowed The Boss on the John Peel stage at Glastonbury.
“It was everyone’s first time there and you hear so much about it, it was kind of unbelievable to be there,” says Ian Hultquist, the man behind Passion Pit’s on-stage wizardry.
“At one point during the show I looked over and Bruce Springsteen was standing on stage, watching us. That was unbelievable, it was really cool, can you imagine?”
The band are one of a number of new wave psychedelic bands who have had an almost meteoric rise to popularity.
Animal Collective and MGMT paved the way for Passion Pit: perhaps by making US experimental pop records trendy, perhaps in the way they’ve all been billed as must-sees in live performance.
But all that hype can be difficult to deal with. Lead singer Angelakos, only 22 and self-confessed pessimist, agrees. “After what we went through making the album and also with all the speculation and the amount of pressure we had been dealing with through the entire process… it’s a relief to finally have Manners out.
“I don’t really consider myself a very road-ready kid, so I needed time to make sure I could do it the right way, because we have a lot of people banking on us at the label. I suppose the record is about growing up, just coming to terms with who I am.”
With a mammoth three-month tour booked and all that expectation, it seems Angelakos doesn’t have much choice.
* Doors 7pm, tickets £9. Call 01273 673311.
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