Cut Copy — “Sands Of Time” — Far Away EP Saw them...

Cut Copy — "Sands Of Time" — Far Away EP

Saw them live on Saturday, and they fared rather well over the course of an hour-long set in the ever-dodgy Terminal 5 (now with fresh empanadas on the 3rd floor!—uh, wut?). Still, I guessed this would be as close as I'd ever get to seeing the Happy Mondays at the Hacienda, downed a Red Bull vodka and watched the sweaty cokeheads rave it up downstairs while soaking in an apparently portable Miami-fried retro light show and heeding every cutely theatrical exhortation to get BLOODY CRAZY. "Sands Of Time" followed a halting explanation that the track would not appear on Cut Copy's next (all signs point to) magnum opus, which makes a certain sense: the EP treatment here has more promise than poise, and I commend them for taking extra time to shape it into the disco trance epic it wants to be. The whirring synth builds, the rubbery bass line, the charmingly stilted vocal delivery replete with cheesy lyrics—it whipped the crowd into a frenzy you wouldn't have predicted, even before a wormhole breakdown that frankly could not be contained. Cut Copy revealed themselves to be masters of the sweet-spot segue that night, and more or less did not let up from the moment they burst into "Hearts On Fire"—quite possibly the best concert kickstart ever, by the way, and that's coming from a guy who prefers the pre-In Ghost Colours demo version. They were really treating it all like an evening at a dance club, and people responded in kind. For the more jaded among us, this will take some getting used to.

Concert bonuses: seeing opener Matt & Kim play half of "The Final Countdown"; subsequently seeing Matt almost break his neck by attempting to walk on the hands of those pressed up against the stage. For the tenth of a second it took him to fall, I had a glimpse of what it was to be a mom.