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Nothing makes you regret willingly traveling to New Jersey quite like sitting aboard a roughly pitching ferry in the middle of the Hudson River while the sky looks like it’s about to peg you in the face with a lightning bolt. Such was the start of my All Points West experience, soon to be deemed All Points Wet by a fellow traveler. I hit one day of the inaugural festival last year, and the three biggest immediate differences this time were tighter security, the stages being way more spread out and a bump to a seven-beer limit from last year’s five-beer cap.
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Passion Pit has been practicing. The band, from Cambridge, Mass., showed ample signs of improvement in executing Michael Angelakos's audio vision in a live atmosphere on Friday night.
The five gentleman, plus a backing vocalist, covered the stage at Bowery with keyboards, synthesizers and a drum kit, in addition to a guitar and a bass, and while the crowd was far more animated than the band, Passion Pit looked comfortable on stage.
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Cross-Pollination celebrated its five-year anniversary Tuesday night at Piano’s. The concept for the weekly series of free shows is actually pretty neat: Two bands play separate sets and then come together to play some songs collectively. The idea was created by Jay Goettelmann and Wesley Verhoeve, and the duo has put on more than 200 shows, as Goettelmann informed the crowd a few times last night during his role as cheeseball MC. Dinosaur Feathers (pictured), an acoustic guitar, keyboard and bass trio, opened with lighthearted songs featuring bright, beach-style harmonies, punctuated with quirks from a laptop that included sleigh bells, clap tracks and stuttering drums. Recordings of the group’s three-part harmonies conjure up audio images of Animal Collective, but it wasn’t quite as thick of a sound live with Tom, the bassist, sitting out on vocal duties due to laryngitis. Still, the vocals of this band were nearly perfect and gave a lot of warmth to instrumental sounds that bordered on experimental.
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There must be a lot of positive vibes in the water in Baltimore. It’s my hometown, so I know that it, like many other cities, is swarming with assholes, but so many of the bands I’ve seen who call Baltimore home are pretty jovial performers, like Dan Deacon or this weekend’s Baltimore reps, Ponytail.
Ponytail played Music Hall of Williamsburg on Saturday night, and the band did nothing to buck the trend of being gracious and energetic hosts. The four-piece band has two guitarists, no bassist, a drummer and a lead singer, and all of the members looked so young and goofy on stage that it was like the band was comprised of escapees from a freshmen-year-of-high-school gym class. The instruments played fast and twitchy experimental sounds that all pushed toward a melodic end, with the dual guitars skidding up and down in note range and the drums either firing out clear slams or muddying the background with big crashes.
In the midst of everything came the vocal punctuation of Molly Siegel. Siegel is the band’s petite sugar pill, who danced and jumped around the front of the stage in a graphic T-shirt featuring a multi-stacked hamburger. Siegel didn’t sing as much as she cooed, barked, yelped and screamed out sounds to complement the backing instruments instead of going with traditional lyrics. Her vocal was so high-pitched and cartoonish that if you closed your eyes, you’d think you were listening to Pikachu’s side project. Make that, Pikachu’s incredibly awesome, frenetic-paced, attention-grabbing side project.
Photo by Jonny Leather
I don’t know what I expected from a show headlined by a band called Starfucker, but dancing, disco-laden, electro-pop was possibly the furthest thing on my mind. And yet, that’s exactly what the Portland, Ore., four-piece put out Wednesday night at Union Hall. Guitar and bass provided the music’s foundation, but the sound took off with the help of peppy keyboards, dance beats on the drums and even a little turntable scratching. Ryan Biornstad served as the band’s wide-eyed and playful frontman, and though his light lead vocal often got overshadowed by the bigger sounds going on around him, his whole-body dance moves still drew all eyes on him.
The group’s set alternated between instrumentals and songs with Biornstad singing, and both approaches kept up the band and the crowd’s energy levels. Starfucker managed to turn out a dance party, even in a normally stiff Wednesday night crowd. I usually play it safe with dancing at concerts, restricting myself to a head bob and a foot tap, but last night I even put my arms up a few times, a credit to the infectious enthusiasm of the group and its music. I haven’t had that much fun on a blind date with a band in a long time.
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/sparklemotion0/
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Webster Hall is a bizarre chameleon. The venue acts as everything from a big hair-gel-required club to the next stop for indie bands that have graduated from Mercury Lounge but aren’t quite ready for the stadium tour. One weekend I stopped in there to see Ra Ra Riot play, and there was an ’80s prom going on downstairs. Last night at Webster, The Walkmen, Beach House and Antlers set up the venue as an ideal place for creating an ambient vibe, with sound filling up every cranny in the high-ceilinged space.
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