image&words//brandon weigel
Three songs into The Drums’ sold out Bowery Ballroom set Wednesday night, one female concertgoer behind me observed that watching the band on stage “[is] like an anthropological study.” This, more or less, perfectly sums up these New Wave revivalists. At points you have to wonder if their music has been locked away in a time capsule for years, the band’s members cryogenically frozen until it was determined they should be let out to unleash 80′s pop on a 21st century audience ready to re-embrace the past.
Even looking at the way the band members cut their hair or how lead singer Jonathan Pierce saunters about the stage like Morrissey, gyrating his body to the backing music and playing with the mic between verses– it feels like you’re taking in an artifact from the past.
As the band delivered synth-infused, jangly-guitar-sounding pop songs, a lot of the audience members did what the actual kids of the new-wave era did at concerts: they danced. That’s no small feat in today’s world of indie rock shows, and a fact that should not be ignored whether you think these guys are the next big thing or a bunch of faux Reagan-era hacks.
As such, the success of the band’s set seemed to rest on how catchy and 80′s-esque the songs sounded. The bigger the hook and the closer the guitar parts jangled to Johnny Marr’s, the better. When they hit their cues, as they did on “Don’t Be a Jerk, Jonny,” which featured The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Peggy Wang pitching in vocals, and a solid rendition of “Let’s Go Surfing,” it was hard not to get caught up in the soaring choruses and pop nostalgia.
But The Drums are still a young band, and their lack of polish made it impossible to fully deliver on all the blog hype that has been heaped upon them. Even though “I Felt Stupid” still managed to hook you in, thanks to the wonderfully addictive guitar licks built by Jacob Graham and Adam Kessler, Pierce sang in an octave that was far too low, to the point where it seemed like he was almost mocking his own recorded version.
When they veered from the up-tempo pop formula to downbeat tunes, it completely sapped the energy they worked to build out of the room. The two-song encore, both slow songs that practically grinded the show to a screeching halt, was, to be blunt, dull and uninspired.
They might want to consider taking a few cues from second opener Surfer Blood, who delivered a pretty straightforward set of power pop lightly colored with surf rock riffs and did a much better job pacing their set. The band played all but one of the 10 tracks off their stellar debut, Astro Coast, the buzzed-about album that has put the band on the same hype wave as the headliner.
With songs like “Floating Vibes” and “Catholic Pagans,” they exhibited their range from chilled out melodic jams to Weezer-like, guitar-charged rockers. Although the band members didn’t always seem comfortable in their own skin up on the stage, they capped off their set with a rousing, full-throated version of their epic sing-along anthem “Swim” that seemed to jolt them back to life.
A lot has been made about both of these bands and their prospects for 2010. Neither managed to really blow anybody away with their efforts on Wednesday, but both showed a great deal of potential. That’s to be expected when dealing with any young band that has been thrust into the blinding spotlight of the music blogosphere by the music blogosphere. As for what we can possibly ascertain about their respective futures, it was clear that Surfer Blood delivered a much cleaner set, but The Drums served up the most highlights when they were hitting all the right notes: the old ones.