I’d say that, for every 5 shows we go to, there are another 5 we attend where I haven’t given an active listen to the band at all. I may have heard them on the radio, or ignored their tunes during my forced music education, but about 50% of the time, I couldn’t tell you a single song by the bands we saw.
It makes for an interesting music review. Uniformed? Yes. Interesting? Why not.
And thus, we went to see War on Drugs and Destroyer at The Loft. No preconceptions (except that the name Destroyer sounds more like a metal band than an indie group) and a bar set pretty darn low.
We started the night off with War on Drugs. Not THE War on Drugs, just like Abe Vigoda is not THE Abe Vigoda. But I digress. War on Drugs (okay, fine, the name sucks) played some of the most amazingly mediocre music I have ever heard. This is the kind of music that exists for montages in somewhat-indie romcoms starring Zooey Deschanel. The couple frolics through a major city (not New York, that’s too mainstream) while a song plays in the background. There are no distinguishable vocals, no notable instruments and no lyrics to remember.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what War on Drugs brought to the table. Interestingly, they had about the same impact as the actual War on Drugs.
Har. Har. Har.
As I write this post, Scrappy is telling me that Destroyer is good. I think they were, but I was preoccupied with lead singer Dan Bejar’s slow descent into alcoholism. When last we saw Dan, he was being dragged to and fro the stage by his fellow New Pornographers. Tonight’s distraction? Sitting down on the stage for incredible lengths of time during every. song. I would constantly lose sight of him, and wonder if he’d given up all together, only to see him pop back up like a musically-inclined jack-in-the-box.
But the band? They were damn good. A rockin’ Kenny G (I apologize, but that’s my default nickname for anyone who plays the sax) teamed with a trumpeteer to provide a multi-layered, really awesome musical experience.
I am currently trying to forget the moment where Dan forgot the lyrics to what he called “Destroyer’s big hit” and spent the whole song reading them off a sheet of paper. Okay. Moving on.
Anyway! Destroyer sounded great. They could harmonize, they could jam and they had fun. A lot of fun, but, hey, the crowd had fun too.
