Tag Archives: Erasure

Music, The Features, We Love Music
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Q&A: Nina @ 9:30 Club — 9/19/14 (Prior to Opening for Erasure)

Nina (Photo courtesy of Aztec Records)

Nina (Photo courtesy of Aztec Records)

Nina, the latest indie-dance chanteuse from the United Kingdom, opened for Erasure in two sold-out dates at the 9:30 Club on Friday, Sept. 19, and Saturday, Sept. 20. If you enjoyed her show in DC or elsewhere, you’ll be pleased to know she has two solo performances coming up in New York City before she returns to London–Friday, Sept. 26, at the Pyramid Club in Alphabet City and Monday, Oct. 13, at Friends and Lovers in Brooklyn.

Watch her video for “We Are the Wild Ones” below and find out more about the artist in our interview afterward! (We talked to Nina Friday before her show at the 9:30 Club.)

Mickey McCarter: Songs like your new single “My Mistake” have a great dance beat but they are lyrically full of loneliness and regret? How do you reconcile that?

NINA: When I write, that’s mainly what I write about. It’s a lot about escape and love and melancholic things. When I write, sometimes I’m in quite a dark space; sometimes I can be in a happy space-–it depends!

I was collaborating with a band called Hunter As A Horse. We were kind of at the same level; we are very similar when it comes to writing. We write very dark lyrics about heartbreak and things like that. So it worked out really well. We also have that dance beat to it as well.

We have a new song, however, that’s slightly different. It’s a little bit more ’80s and a bit more happy. I thought I would try something happy and see how it works! It’s the last song in the set tonight. It’s called “Sweet Surrender.”

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Music, The Features, We Love Music
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We Love Music: Erasure w/ Nina @ 9:30 Club — 9/19/14

Andy Bell and Vince Clarke (Photo by Joe Dilworth)

Andy Bell and Vince Clarke (Photo by Joe Dilworth)

Erasure danced into town over the weekend for a pair of back-to-back sold-out shows at the 9:30 Club.

Well, more accurately, vocalist Andy Bell danced into town–boogied, shuffled, two-stepped–all wild entertainment and outrageous outfits that gave an ample amount of glitz to Erasure’s glossy, high-tempo synth music. His bandmate, the legendary Vince Clarke, more often stood stoically behind his synthesizer, stepping outside his box only occasionally to strum frenetically away on his guitar during super hits like “A Little Respect.”

And the show, which I caught on Friday, Sept. 19, was full of the big hits from Erasure. They opened wisely with eternal fan-fave “Oh L’Amour,” which got the room hopping. One of several nods to the band’s fourth album with the song “Star” followed before Bell introduced material from the band’s 16th studio album, Violet Flame, released literally today in the United Kingdom.

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Adventures, Entertainment, Music, We Love Music
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We Love Music: Ultra Music Festival 2011 @ Bicentennial Park (Miami), 3/25 – 3/27

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all photos by author.

Last weekend I made a quick getaway to Miami to attend the Ultra Music Festival, otherwise known as the biggest electronic music festival in the world. This was the thirteenth installment of this Miami institution and the first time that it was expanded to a three day event. I along with 150,000 devoted dance music fans* sampled some of the world’s best DJs, producers, and electronic-leaning bands at what amounted to a three-day orgy of drugs, sweat, booze, bikinis, concrete, and ultra-heavy bass. I have been to some huge festivals in my day and some mighty big parties, but I don’t think I have ever been to something that combined the two quite like Ultra Music Festival did.

I thought that the readers who follow my musical adventures on We Love DC might like to hear about my field trip down south. The organizers are already planning UMF 2012 and if you dig what you see and read about here, you might want to consider making the trip yourself next year.

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