Phantogram Date: December 5, 2013 Venue: 930 Club, Washington, DC T he 1990's saw an abundance of electronic acts featuring hip-hop beats and sultry female vocals - Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky, Bjork, Sneaker Pimps, Morcheeba, Olive, Esthero and so forth. All these groups operated, more or less, within the genre of "trip-hop" - a style that leaned heavily on the boom-bap aesthetics of hip-hop, dub, and jazz but, in most cases, smoothed out the rough edges. At the time, music critic Simon Reynolds accurately identified that "trip-hop [was] merely a form of gentrification." The genre had the intangible hallmarks of "cool" without much of the danger, inevitably becoming the soundtrack for sophisticated coffee shops, cocktail bars, and car advertisements worldwide. Phantogram The last decade has seen trip-hop wane, supplanted by cutesy synth-pop drawing flagrantly from new wave, new romantic, indie rock, and shoe gaze - s...
My life in music. . . .