Photo Credit: Nathan Lewis
Scanning concert listings, one comes across some variation on the phrase “with very special guests…” so often that after a while it sort of ceases to register much at all, which is usually just as well, since more often than not it’s merely idle marketing-speak (“Very special guests: TBA”? C’mon guys) and everybody just skips the opener anyway. Every once in a while you get lucky however, and the name in smaller prints is just as “big” as the headliner, as was the case when Of Montreal, who despite not being the hot property they once were are still well worth checking out live, announced a string of dates with the always excellent San Francisco outfit Deerhoof, including tonight’s stop at the Turner Hall Ballroom, making for a two-fer that’s hard to pass up.
Wasting no time taking the stage, Deerhoof had an entire hour to themselves and gleefully made the most of it. With a dozen albums, plus a slew of splits, singles and EPs, to select from, there was no shortage of great cuts on display, though Breakup Song’s “There’s That Grin” and Deerhoof vs. Evil’s “I Did Crimes for You” proved to be highlights, and with two members of the current lineup, guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez, hailing from the area, there was plenty of local color too. The band’s noisy, fractured pop is particularly thrilling live, where the oddball time signatures make it seem as if everything could fall apart at any moment (which it actually did during their last song, not that the flub did much to mar an otherwise impressive set).
As the ballroom filled with latecomers unaware of what they’d missed, the lights dimmed and, following a jokey introduction by a masked wrestler (there was some WWE sweat-fest across the street), Kevin Barnes and company came through with an eclectic, crowd-pleasing set, beginning with “Bassem Sabry,” the catchy lead-off track from their new Aureate Gloom. Although they’ve never quite lived up to their synthesizer-drenched 2005 breakthrough The Sunlandic Twins, Of Montreal remain infectiously entertaining, especially since they always travel complete with a psychedelic spectacle, and although tonight that mostly meant the stage looked like a costume shop explosion, there were also some genuinely inspired moments involving elaborate choreography and localized projections. On its own it would’ve been a fine way to spend a Saturday night, but, thanks to Deerhoof, it was doubly so.
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