PHOTOS: Morning After Girls @ Mercury Lounge

Tags: rock

Sydney-bred, NYC-based The Morning After Girls entranced the packed industry-heavy crowd last Tuesday night (1/27/08) at Merc Lounge, with an onslaught of blissed-out psychedelic rock and leaden, Secret Machines and Jesus Mary Chain-esque reverb. Despite their line-up changes (as Christen mentioned earlier), the band showed unity and ease on stage - while Sacha Lucashenko and Martin Sleeman in particular shined. Swiftly, they sweated and riffed us into an aural coma. Twas blissed out and damn sexy.

Sounds Like: My Best Fiend, Primal Scream, the Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Panda Bear

The Morning After Girls - Shadows Evolve

The Morning After Girls - Run For Our Lives

The Morning After Girls - Hi-Skies

The Morning After Girls - Straight Through You

The Morning After Girls' RCRD LBL page

Sacha Lucashenko

We ain't sages but if Morning After Girls can pack the Merc for a promo show like they did the other night for their showcase, they look like they're in for a good year: the front row was filled with Bloggeratti and record label reps; the rest of the room packed with the music bloggers and lovers, all who were kindly invited to taste-test their sound. Also, they were BMI's "Pick of the Month."

It was fun choice for them to showcase at Mercury Lounge in NYC as well - as it is (often) a beloved and almost elemental milestone in most musicians' career (at least US-based)....and the boys just moved to NYC so they deserved a good christening. True- aesthetically Merc is kind of the music venue equivalent of a middle-aged fun-loving chick who's smoked too many cigarettes in her youth (i.e. totally unpretentious but a bit tattered, with sticky floors, dodgy lighting, and a stage that looks like it was nailed together by your dad in your garage twenty years ago). But it's also one of the only consistently intimate venues in NYC where you can walk in randomly and see an ingenue shred and howl and rage, within spitting and sweat-dripping distance.....before they catapult off the charts and you're forced to watch them pea-sized from the back of Webster Hall (if you saw Ida Maria this January or Glasvegas last year @ Merc, you know what I'm talking about).

Suffice to say Merc's magic seemed to rub off - as there was kinetic energy in the air last Tuesday as Morning After Girls played. While we'll have to wait to see what they put out next to see if they stand the test of time, this was a damn good start.