ReadysetDC A CREATIVE URBAN ENTERPRISE

Review: Wallpaper. @ DC9

Photos by Paul Frederiksen

Erik Frederic was nowhere to be found during Wallpaper’s set Monday night at DC9. Instead, the man who took the stage for the relatively short but explosive set was instead his bombastic gold-chain, sunglasses wearing alter-ego, Ricky Reed. Opening with Notorious B.I.G.’s Big Papa, it was apparent from the get-go that the night was going to be filled with good music and absurd silliness in equal measure.

After the opener, the duo wasted no time playing through the single from their last EP T Rex, and their new single I Got Soul (I’m So Wasted). Anyone expecting a full band, think again: for their live shows Reed sings over prerecorded tracks while Arjun Singh backs him up with some funky drumming.  Ultimately though, this is the wrong way to think about the live Wallpaper Experience. This is dance music. Booty shaking, sweaty-ass, funky dance music. So think about it more as a DJ set with a live vocalist and drummer and you’ll get the idea. The crowd certainly didn’t seem to mind the lack of live instruments on stage; they were too busy dancing…even joining Reed and Singh on stage for the last two songs.

More words and photos after the jump:

The duo went through a lot of crowd favorites, including the Jackson 5-esque Gettin Drip, the hilarious Ddd (“My girlfriend, she keeps telling me, you gotta start paying the utilities”), and a modified version of Text Me Your Love, in which Reed professed his unrequited love as a 7-year-old for his 14-year-old swim teacher (“She was so hot, but I was just a minnow”.) The crowd went crazy during the encore, as Reed and Singh covered Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison (To be totally fair though, who doesn’t go crazy when they hear that song?)

When a woman in the crowd took off her bra and placed it around Reed’s neck like a groupee gold medal, Reed wore it for a few minutes before begging the crowd “Can someone get this thing off of me? I never could take a bra off one handed.”

Underneath all the silliness, jokes, and absurdity, Wallpaper demonstrated that they are talented musicians that take their craft seriously. They’re satirists, but they could easily hold their own with just their music alone. Their tracks features layer upon layer of harmonies, and some like Frk Scn and Doodoo Face have an almost jazz-like complexity. The comparisons with Flight of the Concords are inevitable, but where the Concords seems to write the whole song around the joke, Wallpaper just seems more interested in making music that’s as funky and catchy as possible, then presenting it in an absurd way through their lyrics, performances, and the videos. First and foremost, Wallpaper’s music just makes you people want dance, which couldn’t have been clearer on Monday night.