Joy Zipper, Long Island’s dreamy-melodic-indie-poppy couple (+ drummer) played to a sparse but enthusiastic crowd in Crawdaddy on Wednesday night. Tabitha Tindale and Vincent Cafiso seemed happy to be there, and were good humoured throughout, despite Vincent alluding to the place being a ‘rathole’.
Overall, they sounded pretty good, though Tabitha’s keyboard and vocals were sometimes a little too low in the mix. They played an interesting set, mixing up the old and the new, taking a few requests and playing their version of ‘Wave of Mutilation’, which appeared on Pixies tribute album ’Dig For Fire’ in 2007. An encore of ‘Christmas Song’ went down well, though there was no outing for ‘Baby You Should Know’ - probably their best-known song.
It was all fine and nice and unremarkable, and maybe a little harmless, which is not a word I’d like associated with me if I were a musician. The most remarkable thing, for me, was Ms Tindale. It hadn’t crossed my mind before the gig that I’d never seen Joy Zipper and had no idea what they looked like, so I wasn’t expecting her to be so aesthetically pleasing, with her head and her legs and the rest of her.
Support was from Gavin Glass and the Holy Shakers, a crowd I’d not seen before, but apparently they’ve been rattling around for years. They were good - they have a few great tunes, and there were even peculiar spoken-word interludes from a verbose preacher. Entertaining stuff, but they weren’t as handsome as Tabitha.
