Thursday, August 13, 2009

Chris Letterii checks out Dan Deacon and Deerhunter!

At 3:00 p.m., when this show was scheduled to start (at the Williamsburg Waterfront), I was sitting in the Bronx, staring out a window at gray sky and huge, speeding drops as the sound of pounding rain was interrupted only by the occasional, terrifying (Uh, not to me, though. Just terrifying to someone, maybe. Totally not me.) thunderclap. Brooklyn Vegan brought the news that the show was being moved indoors, to the new Brooklyn bowling alley called, aptly enough Brooklyn Bowl. There were to be two shows, one at 7, one at 10, with those shut out of the first show getting wristbands guaranteeing entry to the late one. With my brother holding down a place in line for me, I headed down just before 6, caught both the 4 and L trains just as they were leaving their respective stations (sometimes the MTA does all right), and arrived in line just after 7. Fifty minutes later, my brother and I had to head out to make a dinner reservation -- unfortunately, whoever was running the show (no pun intended -- is that even a pun?) had just started giving out the wristbands, and we were at least 20 minutes away from getting ours. Only one solution remained -- cut the hell out of the line. And I'll be damned if that didn't work perfectly. We simply walked to the front of the line, entered from the side, put out our hands for wristbands, then bopped, real quick. Not that any of the straggly masses we had cut said a thing, of course. They were probably terrified of me, I reckon. Dinner was delicious. And then we returned. We got back to Brooklyn Bowl a little before 11, with time to spare before the main event. The venue is quite enormous -- it is, after all, a functioning bowling alley. The concert area is probably a little bigger than a space like the Bowery Ballroom, with high ceilings where two giant fans -- maybe 12 feet across -- kept everyone somewhat cool. We caught the last opener, a determined man with a mad glint in his eye named Ed Schrader who was armed only with a floor tom and a snarl. I sang along to one song (the refrain was "beautiful transvestite in the rain," so obviously I could help it), but I could have done with about 15 minutes less of his pounding, rather tuneless shanties. By the time Dan Deacon, No Age [http://www.myspace.com/nonoage] and Deerhunter came onstage, it was just past midnight -- a.k.a. party time. In the round-robin format, though, Deerhunter started things off, easing us into the madness that would ensue with the meandering, textural title cut from their album Cryptograms. The madness arrived in the form of No Age, starting the physical part of the show with the propulsive "Sleeper Hold." And people got to moshing -- more precisely: skinny hipsters got to moshing. Of course it was a ton of fun, but everything's a little too easy in a hipster mosh pit: lifting crowd surfers is a cinch, there's not much danger of being punched in the face by a bald guy with many tattoos and a four-inch-long goatee, and (for the faint of heart) a less turbulent crowd is always nearby. There were also lots of smiles among those tossing their bodies hither and yon with reckless abandon; no doubt everyone was relieved and happy simply to be enjoying a concert that ended up being a lot more complicated to get into than expected. Throughout the evening, the moshing would come (during Dan Deacon and No Age) and go (during Deerhunter). The slower, more deliberate Deerhunter songs, rather than dragging the show down, actually served as a welcome counterpoint to the the frenzy of the other two acts. With the show ending at nearly two o'clock a.m., the balance was necessary -- two hours straight of No Age and Dan Deacon madness would have been quite a test of endurance. Whoever planned this crazy tour knew what he or she was doing, though, and it's hard to imagine a free show getting much better than this one.

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