Photo credit: Katelyn Winski
With the Christmas season upon us, the music world is once again occupied with all of its little yuletide rituals, dutifully penning their obligatory year-end best-of lists, checking them twice, and churning out album after pointless album of holiday standards, each destined to become a disappointing gift. Meanwhile, commercial radio stations are busy staging their big seasonal concerts, which annually offer an overstuffed bill of whatever acts extensive market research told them their target demographic would prefer. So beyond being a great opportunity to see on-air personalities throw cheap promotional swag into a crowd, they also serve as a pretty indicative cross section of the year that was, lumping together whoever happens be hot/available at the moment, which for FM 102.1 listeners Thursday night meant a mixed bag of new faces and one ’90s alt-rock staple.
Getting the first night of the station’s 10th annual “Big Snow Show” underway was the Michigan-based Børns, led by eponymous frontman Garrett Borns, whose dazed brand of psychedelic pop justifiably turned a lot of heads in 2015, particularly with the glammy single “Electric Love.” After their short set came New York’s X Ambassadors, whose insipid “Renegades” became a bona fide hit after being featured in an obnoxiously overplayed car commercial. Their other tunes, such as “Jungle” or “Gorgeous,” are just as mind-bogglingly generic and, what’s worse, are performed with no small amount of self-seriousness. Mercifully, the third opener, English outfit Glass Animals, was more interesting. Building solid grooves around simple, repetitive rhythms and keyboard figures, their set included material from their 2014 debut LP, Zaba, but also some adventurous covers, like a reworking of Kanye West’s “Christmas in Harlem.”
Judging by applause, the massive crowd was just as enamored with the warm-up acts as the headliner, but based on apparent T-shirt sales Weezer was clearly who most people had come to see. The quintessential “I love their early stuff” band, they’ve spent much of the new millennium struggling to live up to, or perhaps escape, their impeccable 1990s output, taking them in some ill-advised directions. Nevertheless, Rivers Cuomo and company touched on most of their releases, from Blue Album opener “My Name is Jonas” to questionable turns such as Make Believe’s “Beverly Hills” to “Back in the Shack” from last year’s Ric Ocasek-produced return to form Everything Will Be Alright in the End. Naturally it was somewhat uneven, but its best moments, unsurprisingly ’90s classics, made for some nice musical stocking stuffers.
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