Audio By Carbonatix
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The latest full-length album by Long Island band As Tall as Lions, You Can’t Take It With You, might seem pretty high-concept at first listen. That’s because it is. The band name-checks influences such as performance art piece Fuerza Bruta, for example, along the literary insights of Daniel Quinn’s mythological examination Ishmael. And then there’s the title, which seemed to materialize out of the blue but later revealed a glitch in the matrix. (The band’s vocalist-guitarist, Dan Nigro, believed he saw the phrase in an ad but eventually discovered the 1938 film of the same title.)
It was an inevitable creative turn for this band, which has worked over the course of its eight-year career to hone in on the essence of its sound, capture it, and refine it. And despite all the outer-space pretensions, that’s exactly what the band has done. Unexpected implements contribute to a colorful auditory mélange. From one track to the next, you can hear the cheesy electronic notes of a Suzuki Omnichord, vocals through a $10 megaphone, and chopsticks on a Coke bottle. Opening for the band at the Culture Room this Saturday is Miami’s own Rachel Goodrich, another artist with a knack for creating whimsical pop beauty out of everyday objects.
