Capital Cities at Irving Plaza

Capital Cities is Ryan Merchant and Sebu Simonian, an electronic pop music unit from Los Angeles. The two jingle writers met on Craigslist and recorded the Capital Cities EP in 2011. The duo gained initial exposure on the Pop Up #1 compilation curated by Perez Hilton in 2012. Capitol Records will release a debut album, In a Tidal Wave of Mystery, on June 4.

At Irving Plaza tonight, Capital Cities demonstrated what happens when two jingle writers perform music for public consumption. Backed by programmed tracks and three musicians (guitar, bass and trumpet), Merchant and Simonian performed one song after another that were basically simple (often one line) choruses repeated again and again to throbbing electronic dance music. The formula seemed to be something like this: write a catchy hook as for a 30-second commercial, give it a slick beat, and then loop this combination repeatedly until it sticks in your head to the exclusion of everything else. Call it by any new name, but this performance was retread disco, right down to the five musicians’ matching 1970s-style black satin bomber jackets. In concert, Capital Cities was the antithesis of today’s indie or alternative music; this was flat out corporate pop for the masses. The show closed with the five musicians climbing down from the stage to join the audience in jumping to the rave.