Photo credit: CJ Foeckler
Going to a lot of concerts, it’s interesting to observe how the mundane rhythms of everyday life, like which day of the week a show happens to fall on, affect the overall experience. Mondays, traditionally a “dark day” for theaters, often feel…off. Obviously, any smart promoter is doing their best to book exciting shows on the weekend and save mellower stuff for the school nights, but during the transition to another working week, audiences’ energy levels are trickier to predict. On the one hand, people are looking to take it easy following a few days of cutting loose; on the other, they could use a fun distraction from the long slog that’s still ahead of them. It’s an odd, in-between mood, but one that Baltimore duo Beach House clicked right into Monday night at the Pabst Theater.
Opening act Jessica Pratt, however, fared less well in this context, proving a bit too somber for the sizable crowd, which mostly consisted of young, conspicuously hip white people. While the Drag City recording artist’s set was rather soporific in its own right, it mostly just seemed like the wrong setting for her delicate, droning brand of freak folk. The audience appeared to enjoy it in theory; each song was followed by a polite, supportive round of applause, but the tunes themselves, with their sparse two-guitar arrangements and slight vocals, struggled to rise above the half-interested chatter. Pratt likely converted a fair amount of fans, but struggled to command the full attention of such a large room and, when all was said and done, left the stage without striking much of a chord.
Beach House, by contrast, had the audience’s rapt attention as soon as they launched into “Saltwater” from their eponymous 2006 debut. It set the tone for a show that was practically engineered to be a crowd pleaser, crafted as it was using input from fans, who suggested songs via their novel online “setlist creator.” That meant plenty of deep cuts alongside expected selections from their latest Sub Pop release Depression Cherry, such as “10:37” and “Wildflower.” Helped along here by live drums and an impressive light show, which used mesh fabric and an overworked smoke machine to cloak their presence in a diffuse cloud of color, the band’s style of dream pop, blending introspective shoegazing and radio-friendly hooks, was charming without being challenging, likable but low impact—just the ticket for a Monday night.
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