Lighning Bolt, Dan Deacon and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone played Masonic Temple
Dan Deacon Ensemble
The best and worst thing about DIY shows is that you don’t know what is going to happen. We aren’t in a situation where bands have elaborate riders with bowls only the green M&Ms or a long list of lighting cues or – really anything. The live music atmosphere that so many of us grew up with and are still a part of today is one where bands will play anywhere (how many shows did you go to in VFW halls growing up?), they roll up in their busted and dirty vans, the venues are serving cheap beer out of cases they bought from the deli down the street and there is a room full of sweaty, passionate and appreciative people. It is in this scene where anything can go wrong, or go oh-so right, or be an amazing combination of the two. Something only seen here and in this moment in time. I would say the show at the Ridgewood Masonic Temple on Friday night was one of those.
One of the first amazing and unduplicatable things of the night was that this was Casiotone For The Painfully Alone (AKA Owen Ashworth) ‘s last live appearance in New York City. This is a dude who has been making these plaintive and introspective bedroom tunes for the past 13 years. He took the stage as a one-man, button pushing melancholic machine. It was sort of like revisiting friends from high school and realizing that you are all still the same and can still relate on so many levels. Before he ended his set with the maybe ironic, maybe entirely apropos “Tonight Was A Disaster” he promised us “I’ll be back in a year or two with some new songs. I hope you like them.” So it’s like the beginning of a new chapter or something.
Dan Deacon’s set was the part of the night that got an onslaught of bad luck. Between a non-functioning laptop delaying the Ensemble’s start time for nearly an hour, collapsing lights and broken broken drum heads, this maybe wasn’t the most ideal show for the group. “New York is a stressful place to play,” Dan said on stage, about halfway through his set. “They say if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. But a hot kitchen sucks dick, so why wouldn’t you?” Touché, Dan Deacon. Touché.
But if anyone can bring positive vibes to this type of situation, and still bring about a great time for everyone involved, it is Dan Deacon. Even when his iconic floor-clearing dance-off circle dissipated in mere seconds, he still kept his head up. This guy has come a long way. From being a noisy, bleepy, Sally Jesse Raphael glasses-wearing guy on the floors of venues with an iPod strapped to a banana, he is now an impressive maestro – conducting a 12-person ensemble of art school kids from Baltimore. He played mostly jams from his most recent LP, Bromst, with a few older gems thrown in, including the set-ending “Crystal Cat,” complete with flashing skull projections behind the band. The set may have been cut short, and there may have been some roadblocks in the band’s way, but if you can get a sold-out crowd having that much fun and flooding out into the Bushwick streets that sweaty, you are doing something right.
When Lightning Bolt took the stage at nearly 1 am, it seemed like the crowd was ready to go crazy (in the good way). They had been nostalgic and heartbroken by Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, and gotten warmed up with the Dan Deacon Ensemble, but these were people who came here to FREAK OUT! And I’ll be damned if Lightning Bolt isn’t both the perfect band for that and also the band most prepared to freak out themselves.
Their set was not without complications either. Drummer/singer/Elmo mask-wearer Brian Chippendale broke the head on his snare drum. He stabbed his drum stick into downward into the hole and told bassist Brian Gibson to keep playing while he reached over for a spare snare. I can’t imagine Chippendale’s breaking things to be a rare occurrence, dude drums like he is frantically (and rhythmically) being attacked by a swarm of hornets. With a wall of amps behind them and a commitment to producing full-on and loud music, these are two dudes who can fill the big Masonic temple with a grinding, fuzzy assault. It is almost unbelievable that only two people can produce this much pure sound. I wanted to dance, but just found myself staring – gaping – at the stage, trying to track what each dude was doing and assign each sound I was hearing to each cymbal strike or string pluck.
Maybe it wasn’t a perfect night of live music. But if nothing else, it was a distinctly human night of music. I wouldn’t want anything different.
Here is a video of Lighning Bolt from Friday night.
lightning bolt went on at 12:15. it wasn’t nearly 1am at all.
they would have been completely on time if Dan Deacon and his band had not brought malfunctioning power strips, and failed to replace them for an hour.