Friday nights at Baltimore’s Bourbon Street are often bustling; crowds of people congregate on the various levels of the club to listen to the headliner, whether popular or not and alcohol flows through dancing bodies.
This past Friday, Bourbon Street felt particularly full, as crowds from all over Md. came to see Beats Antique.
The band’s aesthetic, a mix of drum heavy electronic music and world fusion, is fast and multifaceted.
Beats Antique draws inspiration from tango, break dance and Indian dance. Their sound harkens back to ancient Middle Eastern tunes and yet feels astoundingly modern.
The medley of electronic pre-recorded melodies and live drums often features appearances from the violin and a variety of percussion instruments.
The crowd was lively on all three levels of the Bourbon Street dance floors that were open to the public. Girls with glow sticks dangling from their bodies hula-hooped in the midst of scraggly looking men who spoke various foreign tongues.
A man in the middle of the dance floor spoke a mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic to his friend while intermittently singing an afro-beat-inspired number.
The opening act was certainly good, but not particularly inspiring.
Eskmo, stage name for Brendan Angelides, a San Francisco native who began producing music in the past decade, played a set of eclectic, often bizarre, electronic tunes that seemed to blend into each other.
Perhaps the most memorable part of Eskmo’s act was its seemingly spontaneous nature within a genre that often feels over produced and lacking of a live feel.
Eskmo ripped paper on the Bourbon Street stage and played objects as makeshift instruments.
However, the crowd was even more riled up when Beats Antique entered the stage. When David Satori, Tommy Cappel and, of course, the seductive Zoe Jakes moved onto the stage with their respective percussion ensembles, thunderous applause resonated from all levels of Bourbon Street.
Zoe Jakes, previously a dancer for The Yard Dogs Road Show, sauntered onto the stage and made everyone swoon with her incredible belly dancing talent.
The band played a mix of their popular songs and their less well-known tunes. Their hits like, “Beauty Beats” and “Egyptic” were fantastically played.
The group used a mixture of live and pre-recorded, syncopated and gunfire drumming.
The intermingling of ceaseless beats and hypnotic melodies was perfectly suited for a night of dancing.
But, aside from the distinguishable hits and the band’s decision to dress up in animal costumes during their encore, the concert often felt lifeless.
A lot of the band’s songs seem to follow the same trajectory and often share similar refrains or harmonies.
Though the sound Beats Antique has is both interesting and unique, more variety within their music would undoubtedly be welcomed.
Amelie Nkodo, a freshman who went to the concert remarked about the show, “It was a really great crowd and they were really into the music. The problem is that the music was kind of repetitive at times. The belly dancer was hot, though.”
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