The Suffolk
107 Suffolk St. between Delancey & Rivington Sts.
Saturday, February 26, $3, 11:00 pm
www.builtbyanimals.com
Don’t get confused about what Discover said about Built by Animals: “It is to the eternal credit and pride of humanity that scientists like Mike Hansell strive with insight and ingenuity to catalogue the wonders of the natural world and to convey their findings in such enthusiastic fashion to the rest of us blinkered anthropocentrics.” The science magazine was talking about the 2007 book Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture. Brooklyn music trio Built by Animals, on the other hand, catalogue the wonders of the savage corporate world with insight and ingenuity for the rest of us blinkered anthropocentrics. Lead singer and bass player Nick Crane, guitarist Morgan von Ancken, and drummer Matt Graff have been compared to a wide array of indie darlings — Weezer, Guster, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Vampire Weekend, Radiohead, Phoenix, the Pixies, the Strokes, Bishop Allen, and Jeff Tweedy, and we’d throw in early Hold Steady as well — but their debut EP, Corporate Syndrome (Shmiz, June 2010), is not the derivative mélange those comparisons might imply for the CMJ vets. From the opening cough on “Return to the Power Kingdom” to the killer guitar riff on “Teenage Rampage,” from the ticking time bomb of “Spreadsheets” to the twisting melodies of “Ducks,” BBA documents the natural but depressing progression from high school to college to a corporate life of cubicles and Excel reports. “Listen to them today before you give up entirely,” they explain about themselves in their mission statement. You can listen today to the streaming EP on their website, but you can also hear and see them Saturday night at the Suffolk on the Lower East Side, where they’re holding the launch party for their brand-new music video, “Ellen Page.” (They’ve previously paid homage to the late singer-songwriter “Elliott Smith.”). I Love Monsters kicks things off at 11:00, followed by Quiet Loudly at midnight and the premiere of the video and a set by BBA at 1:00, with two-buck PBRs all night long.