yeah. so columbus doesn't pack in the crowds that have the most enthusiastic participation drives, especially in march. so i dont know if it was the fact that it was Akron/Family or the comfortable crowded venue, but despite a lackluster crowd response, there was a penetrating electric feel uniting the crowd.
Wednesday i went with john.a and megan.a to see Akron/Family, with the opening band Delicate Steve. It just so happened that I installed and booted up Songbird on Wednesday. It just so happened that I tethered my phone while I was at work (never happens anymore). and It just so happened that I clicked on the 'upcoming events' add-on, WHICH had been disabled temporarily (deprecated) but I randomly updated despite knowing updating (effectively re-adding) broken addons slows songbird. So anyway, suffice it to say, some great random coicidences, along with downloading Akron/Family's new album two days prior, led to me wanting to go.
Currently they are on tour supporting that new album, called "S/T ][ : The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT." it's an epic beast of a listen. A lead up press release from their label Dead Oceans had this to say, “S/T II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT .” In a press release from Dead Oceans, an account of the “arrival of the album” was given; “Opening it revealed a sincere but poorly made diorama of futurist swirling spaces filled with toy astronauts and dinosaurs, four blown out song fragments on a TDK CDR in a ziplock bag, three pictures, a track list written in crayon, and a typewritten note from Akron/Family. A post-it on the bag declared that the band refused to send the full album to anyone but the vinyl pressing plant…”
The opener, Delicate Steve, is quickly becoming my new at-work listening music, and anywhere else. I've logged 82 listens since yesterday. They have a great studio album. But live (and unlistened to previously, for me) they had a warm dynamic on stage. They are all very young, and on the one hand it seemed like college kids with degrees in [band], and on the other they had an aneseptic garage or basement party feel. The album doesn't highlight the lead guitarist's work as much. Nor does it really capture the sound from the stage. From the studio they sound more like Ween, but more on the side of building rather than "challenging" compositional structure. Live, the Ween element was there, but there was also an early Dinosaur Jr. doing surf rock thing happening too.
The band worked incredibly well together and each one hopped to the next queue with an unremitting energy. The soprano-alto lead guitar, which is more of a tenor-alto on the record, nailed every note with a precision and lack of mercy that you almost ended up feeling bad for what at times was strung to sound almost like a toy guitar. The drummer / percussionist was the most visceral, as opposed to technical, of the group. But his work was the hardest; keeping every piece from being some disembodied riff. The drumming comes across more prevalent on stage than off, mostly due to his hunched standing over his cauldrons of noise. They keys are more dominant on record than on stage, but this may have been due to the slowness of the sound board.
Once they had finished, Akron/Family came on and played for about 100 minutes straight through. One thing megan.a mentioned, that we also picked up on, was the lack of interludes between songs. The band would thread 3-5 songs together, in an effortless meld. Amazing and epic as this was, it seemed a poor fit for the performance space. Whether because of the low turnout (when we saw Bon Iver there it was packed to the balcony with people chilling out against or on any surface available), or the crowd's temperance itself, the space Akron/Family was creating was being partially lost.
About 2/3 of the way through the show, they broke out into "Another Sky" and during the chant of "WHOA-Oh-oh-oh-Oh-oh ohh ohh" the crowd just wasn't playing along. Maybe it's because it's the first week in March, or was there a final that week, or that the performance space is almost completely black, but few among the crowd got into it. Not at first anyway. Eventually about 30% of both sides of the room were hooting along, then the singers divided up the room into the stage left and right sides doing offset competing chants.
Beyond the crowd's lackluster performance and enthusiasm, the band was great. Down to just three now, both the bassist and guitarist now have podiums, draped with pretty linens, of doodads and noise makers to play with. Their spotless execution and nasty grinding out of songs like "Silly Bears" and the like, as well as the weird and the transcendental, called to inner animal spirits; it's everything in me to not feel like growling and running around on four legs.
I got a chance to talk to the "delicate" Steve of Delicate Steve. He was in the back by the sound board, where we were standing, at the latter half. Delicate Steve had gotten up on stage for a brief jam session with Akron/Family. Seemed like a good guy. I gave him a recommendation to check out Buckeye Donuts if they were hungry after the show, since its decent, open late and was right across the street. Here's me: "you should check out Buckeye Donuts, they a good gyro, falafel..." "they have donuts too right?" "oh, yeah, good stuff."
Delicate Steve - "Wondervisions" Video (Feat. Nat Baldwin) from stereogum on Vimeo.
10:35AM in 
