I almost fell out of my seat just now when I got the notification in my inbox. THE THUMBS ARE PLAYING A SHOW TONIGHT!?!?
But lo, I will not see the punk band that broke up over a decade ago tonight. Bandsintown faked me out hard. For those of you don’t know, Bandsintown is a concert information service that analyses your music library and lets you know when the musicians you like are coming to town. It’s very similar to SongKick, which does almost the same thing. I rely heavily on both services, and they point me to shows I didn’t know about. More shows all the time — hurray.
But every now and then, Bandsintown shits the bed. For example, the band playing tonight at the Bowery Electric is not angry punk rock band The Thumbs. Instead, it’s New York indie pop Danny Fingers and the Thumbs. I’m sure they’re very good or whatever, but I don’t care about them. Now my brain is derailed and all I’m thinking about is weird shows I went to ages ago. Even the little thumbnail next to the name The Thumbs is definitely the scrappy band I liked in high school. Hrmph.
This isn’t the first time Bandsintown has screwed up, either. Tell me, Bandisintown, how did you resurrect glam guitar legend Marc Bolan so that T. Rex could play a show? I thought he died in 1977. (There is no T. Rex show tonight.)
And I remember the pain and suffering I felt when the Bandsintown app notified me that LCD Soundsystem were playing a show. (It was a cover band.)
lol @bandisontown notified me about a new LCD Soundsytem show. Turns out it’s just a shitty cover band. Thanks jerks. pic.twitter.com/8aTbg7uiYZ
— mario aguilar (@mariojoze) July 16, 2014
OK, so I love Bandsintown, and in fairness I would rather get a few false positives than miss out on a show because the service’s filtering was too strict. Still, it’s not unreasonable to expect that it would know that T. Rex broke up 40 years ago when its frontman died in a car wreck. Come on. Please. Have a little sympathy on me.