The Virgins
January 25, 2009
The Drunken Unicorn
By Alexandra Edwards
It was LA meets NYC on the staging ground of the Dirty South this past weekend at the Drunken Unicorn, and it was more fun than a crowd should be allowed to have on a Sunday night.
Starting things off around 9 p.m. — early for a Unicorn show — Anya Marina entertained the crowd with nothing but her guitar, an iPod full of pre-programmed beats, and a wild sense of humor. Between singing clever songs in her beautifully raspy voice, she chatted at length about touring ("It's like Groundhog Day"), giving up smoking (she replaced it with an addiction to green tea), and the New Age ways of her fellow Los Angelenos. Marina played a few songs on electric guitar at first, but watched her fingers a little awkwardly as she did. She loosened up considerably when she switched to her acoustic. After covering "Georgia on My Mind," she joked about all the amazing poets who hail from our great state, before going straight into a breathy rendition of T.I.'s "Whatever You Like."
After that, Lissy Trullie took the stage in all her downtown fashionista glory. She's boyish and thin; in her leather jackets and short shorts, it was a little like watching Edie Sedgwick front the Velvet Underground. The band (confusingly also named Lissy Trullie) sounds like that too, in a good way. Their early-days NYC punk isn't so much pared down as it is perfected — simplicity for them is a style, not a limitation due to a lack of ability. Trullie's low voice is perfect for the aesthetic, too. And though she claimed she wasn't "funny like Anya is," she kept up the humor by telling dirty jokes that got the crowd laughing and yelling.
Up last, The Virgins opened with "Teenage Lovers" and got the crowd moving immediately. Their New York City style could be mistaken for London, from singer Donald Cumming's charmingly crooked teeth to the band's highly danceable New Wave sound. Imagine if, in some alternate universe, New Order formed a few years early and moved to Manhattan to hang out with Richard Hell. Now imagine it actually turned out really, really good, and you'll get a vague idea of what the band was like.Cumming jumped around the stage, slurring and yelping his words while the fast-paced cymbal underneath everything kept the songs upbeat.
The crowd even got to join in the fun. First, a fan was pulled onstage to dance and sing along, which she did enthusiastically. Later, after Cumming botched the punchline of a joke about a giraffe walking into a bar, he got a couple people in the crowd to shout out their own jokes, in keeping with the theme of the evening. The best was contributed by a girl standing off to the side: "What kind of bees make milk?" she asked, and then, after a moment of silence, answered, "Boobies!" Cumming shook his head at the rest of us and explained, "She's from California."
He ended the set by jumping down into the crowd and applauding his band. Then, with a friendly smile, he turned around and struck up a conversation with the kids in the first row, who were still laughing.
