Jam of the Night – Primetime Passion Pit

Even though it seems like Passion Pit is everywhere these days following the release of Manners (which we wrote about back in May), there’s one place they haven’t been: in your TV! But that’s all about to change after tonight, when their performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon airs later this evening.

We ended up scoring some free tickets to the taping as part of the “Band Bench” program, meaning that in return for our seats, we would agree to join the band on stage during their performance and promote a sense of excitement and dance around in the name of Passion Pit. Not a bad deal.

Of course, The Roots are the house band. We had always been relatively skeptical of this move by The Roots (could this be the very definition of selling out? Is this a good artistic move?), but to be honest they looked like they were having a great time, and were as funky as they ever were back in the day. Isn’t hip hop mainstream at this point anyway? It didn’t seem like a such a stretch for them to be comfortable and dynamic up there on the NBC stage.

The show was pretty alright, with Fallon sometimes stumbling, sometimes funny. Leslie Mann (Funny People, Knocked Up) seemed slightly off, like either she was on downers, or completely overworked and loopy. But overall she was pretty charming and nice. Michael Lang, the creator of Woodstock, seemed to be a completely chill, honest guy, although he wasn’t very animated. It’s pretty unbelievable that dude was 24 when he put Woodstock together; way to set the life accomplishment bar high. How do you surpass that?

But hey, we were there to see Passion Pit. And once we were up in the little balcony and looking at the homeboys rocking out below and sounding pretty great, it was difficult not to feel like this was a solid replacement for the cubicle on a Wednesday afternoon, listening to:

Passion Pit – The Reeling:

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