Erik Kabik

Vampire Weekend

While the masses flocked to Indio to scorch themselves at Coachella this weekend, I decided to die of heat exhaustion in another desert--Las Vegas. You see, all those festival bands have to kill time between weekends somehow, and what better way to skip up to Sin City for a show? It works out well for them and all of us who don't want to fork out the dough to go, well, get sunburned.

Thanks to the lovely people at The Cosmopolitan, I was able to stay in Vegas Friday and Saturday night on a writer's salary and catch Vampire Weekend and Yeah Yeah Yeahs in their transitional Coachella moments. The bands played at the hotel/casino's Blvd Pool (yes, this venue acts as a pool/lounge area for guests during the day, pretty awesome), giving their fans a much more intimate concert setting than being squished between thousands upon thousands of sweaty festival goers.

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Things don't look so bad from the top.

If you've caught the lackluster Carell/Buscemi/Carrey comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone since it opened last weekend, you've quickly become well-acquainted with Imagine Dragons' "On Top of the World" if you didn't know the song already. The folky tune is utilized repeatedly in Burt Wonderstone as a go-to motif for when a sequence that's exuberant, uplifting and cathartic--maybe even schmaltzy--is about to unfold. The song is an apt choice for such use not only because it's truly joyful but also because it's about as zeitgeist-y as a musical cue in March 2013 can get.

"On Top of the World" comes from Night Visions, the 2012 debut full-length by the Las Vegas-rooted Dragons. All this talk of Dragons is convenient since Visions is practically some kind of mythological beast itself. The record is both the product of a young rock band and a dominant force on the Billboard charts; nowadays, albums get to be one but not the other.

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Wyatt Boswell

Fist pumping with Brandon Flowers

The Killers

The Cosmopolitan

December 29, 2012

Going to Las Vegas to party for New Year's has long been the southern Californian's go-to tactic for no-frills debauchery in a state where it pays to be a degenerate. And while most of the time ringing in the new year is reason enough to brave the traffic, long lines and legions of bobbleheads dawdling around virtually every square foot of sin city, sometimes there's actually a special event that draws people to the desert this time of year. This year, it was The Killers'  two night stint, Dec. 28th-29th, at the Chelsea Theater inside the Cosmopolitan hotel.

Being that the Killers originally hail from Las Vegas (read: homecoming show fuckery abound) and the fact that the only southern California tour dates they've designated was one show at the Henry Fonda theater in LA back in September (on a Wednesday night, no less) and then two festival appearances this past month (91X's Wrex the Halls in San Diego & the KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas 2012), with no further SoCal dates posted on the band's website, catching the Killers in their hometown seemed the only way for an OC Killers fan to go.

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