Is it hard for German people to pronounce the ‘V’? The members from American band Wampire will probably answer ‘yes’ to this question. Their name comes from a German foreign student, who was always flipping his V’s and W’s. The psychedelic group from Portland, Oregon played in The Shacklevell Arms, er, The Shacklewell Arms on Tuesday June 18th.
Wampire make a kind of music that is very psychedelic and finds some similarities with the music on the marvellous 2010 album ‘Congratulations’ from MGMT. They are a five-piece band, but on their best-known official band photos we only see frontmen Eric Phipps and Rocky Tinder, pulling off worse-than-bad eighties blouses. Phipps and Tinder initially started this band as a laptop music thing, but they got tired of it and wanted to play with a full band.
This worked out pretty well for them and 2013 saw the international release of their first record ‘Curiosity’. They are currently doing a tour trough Europe and last night it brought them to The Shacklewell Arms in Dalston. The venue, which can pretty well be described as hipster’s paradise, is the perfect kind of place for a band like Wampire: it’s loaded with musically interested people and the Indian pictures on the wall perfectly contribute to the psychedelic weirdness of Wampire.
Although their gig in The Shacklewell arms was a very short one – their album contains of only nine songs, it showed that Wampire has everything to become the new sensation from America. At first, they have got the songs. The band started with up-tempo single ‘The Hearse’, which caused a speedy start, so the audience became directly into the music. For the rest of the gig they perfectly combined rapid songs with slower ones. One of the peaks was a cover of Kraftwerk’s ‘Das Modell’, followed by a huge applause, which the band answered with ‘danke schön’.
It’s been a good step for Phipps and Tinder to hire three other band members, because they now produce a wall of sound that sounds well-oiled, thoughtful, sometimes Bowie-ish and never over-the-top. Wampire are very likely to become known for a bigger audience. The early adapters in The Shacklewell Arms knew it, we know it and now it’s time for the world to find out.
